tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864Wed, 21 Feb 2018 11:22:11 +0000statisticsphilosophyscienceAfghanistanCanadaartpropagandawarconsciousnessmathematicsmediaBarack ObamaFlashIndependent Panel on Canada's Future Role in AfghanistanJohn ManleycausalityevidencelanguagelogicpeacephotographsplacebotechnologyBPAMargaret WenteSTATsSam HarrisStatistical Assessment Servicebiological determinismbisphenol Acancercausal inferencedatadata visualizationdemocracydeveloping countrieseconomicsemotionfront groupsgeneticsinternational developmentiphonelog base 2logarithmmindmodelsplasticpoetrypoliticsproofproroguerespecttheologytortureA-B-C modelACSHAIAIDSAl GoreAlbertaAmerican Council on Science and HealthC. S. 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MyersRam MyersRansom MyersRick HillierSASSPSSSalazarSanta ClausSmiths FallsStar TrekStephen HarperSteven HalesTrevor ButterworthU.S. Presidential electionWilliam Cowperantidepressantsatheismbar chartbiasbinarybiologyboard of directorsbooksbreast-feedingcalculatorcancer clustercartooncasinoschange blindnesschocolatechristmasclinical trialcolorcolor symbolismcolor visioncolourcommitmentcomplexityconceptual graphsconfidence intervalconfidentialityconflictconflict of interestconsciencecouragecreativitydata analysisdecencydeceptiondepressiondescriptive statisticsdevelopmentdiabetesdo not call listdon't askecological fallacyelectionsempty nameepidemiologyequivalenceethicsevolutionexponentialexponential decayexponential growthfascismfish oilsfisheriesflowersfood crisisformula-feedingfridgefundamentalismfundinggamblinggender differencesgenocideglobalizationgooglinggooglologygraphshealthhealth care reformhersheyhistoryhuman behaviourhuman rightsideasidolatryin memoriamincarceration rateindependentinevitabilityinferenceinferential statisticsintelligent designjob lossesjournalismlawsuitlevels of measurementlieslogmagneticmapsmedia concentrationmememeta-analysismiraclesmissing valuesmoralitymusicmythical beastsnative peoplesnatural selectionnon-inferioritynon-profitnorth american free trade agreementomega-3ontarioopt-inopt-outoutliersoversimplificationpainfully bad humourpaintingsperogiespet peevespharmaceuticalsphenomenologyphilatelyphysicalismpierogispilgrimagepolarized thinkingpovertyprediction marketsprobabilityprofitspropspublic opinion pollingpublic relationsquincuncial projectionracetracksrandomnessratio measurementresponsibilitysafetyscientific lawsscientific modelsscientific theoriesscientismscientistsemioticssimplicitysimplificationskepticismsmokingsocial bookmarkingstart-at-0supernaturalsymbolstelemarketingtelevisiontessellationthird worldthoughttwinsuniversal healthcarevisionvoter turnoutweapons of mass destructionweb 2.0zombiesLog base 2Perspectives on statistics, science, technology, politics, history, language, and culture from Nick Barrowmanhttp://logbase2.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)Blogger169125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-3311238077952364847Sat, 08 Nov 2014 13:22:00 +00002014-11-08T13:32:14.356-05:00Be the change?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PIfU0MuQb9s/VF4YjYEUssI/AAAAAAAABIQ/hgHyc_EPWiY/s1600/earth%2Bfrom%2Bspace.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PIfU0MuQb9s/VF4YjYEUssI/AAAAAAAABIQ/hgHyc_EPWiY/s1600/earth%2Bfrom%2Bspace.png" height="200" width="200" /></a></div>"Be the change you wish to see in the world"--It's no wonder this saying (let’s call it BTC) has become so popular. From its sense of immediacy to its spiritual turn of phrase, BTC hits all the right notes. It doesn't hurt that it is commonly attributed to Gandhi, even though, as writer <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/falser-words-were-never-spoken.html">Brian Morton</a> has noted, the closest Gandhi came to BTC was a passage including these words: "If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change."&nbsp; <br /><br />Although BTC echoes some of Gandhi’s themes, its phrasing and emphasis are notably different. What is clear is that its concise form delivers a potent message about the potential for transformation--and this provides us with a window into contemporary values.<br /><br />BTC suggests that if, for example, you wish for more patience in the world, you should be more patient yourself. Presumably if you succeed in becoming more patient, then you have increased the global level of patience. Furthermore, your example may encourage others. This appears plausible, and in cases like this BTC seems to provide good guidance.<br /><br />What if you seek a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions? You can’t “be” less greenhouse gas emission, but following the spirit of BTC, you should aim to produce less emissions yourself. But suppose you want an improvement in the human rights situation in Burma? How can you “be” such a change? Here, there isn't much guidance. BTC is sometimes interpreted to mean “If you want to see change in the world, then do something.” But this is too broad. BTC is more than an encouragement to take action--it’s about personal change as a vehicle for transforming the world.<br /><br />Like many sayings, BTC is a mixed bag. To its credit, it encourages each of us to examine the role we play in larger-scale problems, and it calls us to take action. But troublingly, BTC hints that any problem can be solved by changing individual behaviours. Thus, the problem of greenhouse gas emissions could be solved if we carpooled and used public transportation, used less energy to heat and cool our homes, and so forth. But while individual lifestyle choices are clearly important, the problem is much more extensive and complex than this. Greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed not only to individual choices but also to large-scale industrial and agricultural operations, not to mention military activities. It might be argued that such factors can ultimately be traced to individual lifestyle choices: companies only produce what customers demand, governments simply respond to the public will. But this is simplistic: companies may be driven by the market, but they also affect the market through advertising and political influence; governments respond not only to the public will, but also to powerful people and corporations.<br /><br />Regardless, we still face the question of how best to effect change. BTC encourages each of us to change ourselves. But even in problems where individual behaviour plays a central role, broader issues are often involved. For example, automobiles are a major producer of greenhouse gases. But our reliance on them is part of an intricate web of social and economic factors, such as urban sprawl, public transit options, tax policies, and government regulations. If complex problems are seen largely as personal lifestyle issues, structural factors may not get the attention they deserve. At its worst, a focus on personal lifestyle can become a fetish, and broader issues may be ignored.<br /><br />During the American civil rights movement, many wished to see an end to racial discrimination. BTC would suggest that those people should have worked to end their own discriminatory behaviour. But discrimination was more than an individual behaviour, it was an entrenched institutional problem. The civil rights movement used political action such as protest marches to press for structural changes in American society, such as desegregation of schools and the outlawing of discriminatory employment practices. Of course, in many cases personal transformation and political change go hand in hand. However BTC tends to encourage--and reflect--a belief that personal transformation is sufficient.<br /><br />Another interesting aspect of BTC is the distinctly spiritual tone in the words "be the change", echoing the transformative themes so common in religious traditions. The notion that transcendent meaning may be found in personal change need not stand in opposition to an understanding of the mechanisms by which broader change can be effected. But BTC conflates personal change with change in the world, hinting that in some mystical sense they are the same thing.<br /><br />Equating personal and societal change obscures the mechanisms by which change is actually brought about. To understand these mechanisms, we need to pay closer attention to the messy connections between our efforts and their outcomes, including the role of other contributing factors, barriers to change, possible synergies, and the unanticipated consequences that our actions may produce. A commitment to change requires considering the pros and cons of various choices in the face of inevitable uncertainty. Unfortunately, BTC may cut this process short.<br /><br />The popularity of BTC reflects a concern about our role in the problems of the world and a desire to bring about change, but it also reflects our society’s preoccupation with self-improvement, which sometime veers into self absorption. BTC deftly substitutes personal transformation for global change. The risk is that even as it empowers us to transform ourselves, BTC threatens to further disengage us from the world.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2014/11/be-change.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-3462617864122982349Fri, 15 Jun 2012 01:38:00 +00002012-06-14T21:58:53.756-04:00Rethinking data<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z_tITyF-cr4/T7egcGlxtMI/AAAAAAAAA-M/K6vA5GwTI_8/s1600/data%2Bimage%2Btable%2B3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="274" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z_tITyF-cr4/T7egcGlxtMI/AAAAAAAAA-M/K6vA5GwTI_8/s320/data%2Bimage%2Btable%2B3.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>"Data! Data! Data!" he cried impatiently. "I can't make bricks without clay." — Sherlock Holmes in <i>The Adventure of the Copper Beeches</i>.<br /><br />Data may be the preeminent obsession of our age<a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2012/06/rethinking-data.html" name="backref1"></a><a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2012/06/rethinking-data.html#ref1">[1]</a>. We marvel at the ever-growing quantity of <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/may/18/digital-content-expansion">data on the Internet</a>, and fortunes are made when Google sells shares for the first time on the stock market. We worry about how corporations and governments collect, protect, and share our personal information. A beloved character on a television science fiction show is named Data. We spend billions of dollars to convert the entire human genome into digital data, and having completed that, barely pause for breath before launching similar and even larger bioinformatic endeavours. All this attention being paid to data reflects a real societal transformation as ubiquitous computing and the Internet refashion our economy and, in some respects, our lives. However, as with other important transformations—think of Darwin's theory of natural selection, and the revolutionary advances in genetics and neuroscience—misinterpretation, misapplication, hype, and fads can develop. In this post, I'd like to examine the current excitement about data and where we may be going astray.<br /><br /><b>Big Data</b><br /><br />Writing in the New York Times, Steve Lohr <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/06/technology/06stats.html?_r=1">points out</a> that larger and larger quantities of data are being collected—a phenomenon that has been called "Big Data":<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore — sensor signals, surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, a research firm.</i>&nbsp; </blockquote><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7Vfrlpx94l0/T9qVEp6GEdI/AAAAAAAABA0/93iclKMQPOk/s1600/popular+science+data+cover+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7Vfrlpx94l0/T9qVEp6GEdI/AAAAAAAABA0/93iclKMQPOk/s1600/popular+science+data+cover+small.jpg" /></a>Widespread excitement is being generated by the prospect of corporations, governments, and scientists mining these immense data sets for insights. In 2008, a <a href="http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v455/n7209/edsumm/e080904-01.html">special issue</a> of the journal Nature was devoted to Big Data. Microsoft Research's 2009 book, <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/collaboration/fourthparadigm/">The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery</a>, includes these reflections by Craig Mundie (p.223): <br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Computing technology, with its pervasive connectivity via the Internet, already underpins almost all scientific study. We are amassing previously unimaginable amounts of data in digital form—data that will help bring about a profound transformation of scientific research and insight.&nbsp;</i><b> </b></blockquote>The enthusiasm in the lay press is even less restrained. Last November, Popular Science had a special issue all about data. It has a slightly breathless feel—one of the articles is titled "The Glory of Big Data"—which is perhaps not so surprising in a magazine whose slogan is "The Future Now".<br /><br /><b>Data Science </b><br /><br />Along with the growth in data, there has been a tremendous growth in analytical and computational tools for drawing inferences from large data sets. Most prominently, techniques from computer science<i>—</i>in particular <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_mining">data mining</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning">machine learning</a><i>—</i>have frequently been applied to big data. These approaches can often be applied <i>automatically—</i>which is to say, without the need to make much in the way of assumptions, and without explicitly specifying models. What is more, they tend to be <i>scalable—</i>it is feasible (in terms of computing resources and time) to apply them to enormous data sets. Such approaches are sometimes seen as <i>black boxes</i> in that the link between the inputs and the outputs is not entirely clear. To some extent these characteristics stand in contrast with statistical techniques, which have been less optimized for use with very large data sets and which make more explicit assumptions based on the nature of the data and the way they were collected. Fitted statistical models are interpretable, if sometimes rather technical.<br /><br />In an <a href="http://www.analytics-magazine.org/may-june-2012/572-executive-edge-the-times-they-are-a-changin-for-advanced-analytics">article on big data</a>, Sameer Chopra suggests that organizations should "embrace traditional statistical modeling and machine learning approaches". Some have argued that a new discipline is forming<i>—</i> dubbed&nbsp;<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_science">data science</a><a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2012/06/rethinking-data.html" name="backref2"></a><a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2012/06/rethinking-data.html#ref2">[2]</a><i>—</i>which combines these and other techniques for working with data. In 2010, <a href="http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/06/what-is-data-science.html">Mike Loukides</a> at O'Reilly Media wrote a good summary of data science, except for this odd claim:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Using data effectively requires something different from traditional statistics, where actuaries in business suits perform arcane but fairly well-defined kinds of analysis.</i></blockquote>Leaving aside the confusion between statistics and actuarial science (not to mention stereotyped notions of typical attire), what is curious is the suggestion that "traditional statistics" has little role to play in the effective use of data. Chopra is more diplomatic: machine learning "lends itself better to the road ahead". Now, in many cases, a fast and automatic method may indeed be just what's needed. Consider the recommendations we have come to expect from online stores. They may not be perfect, but they can be quite convenient. Unfortunately, the successes of computing-intensive approaches for some applications has encouraged some grandiose visions. In an emphatic piece titled "<a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory">The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete</a>", Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, writes:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. </i></blockquote>Furthermore:<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.</i></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nw4Yg88eClI/T9qVuHmli3I/AAAAAAAABA8/y6FLo8h05hY/s1600/dumping+station+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nw4Yg88eClI/T9qVuHmli3I/AAAAAAAABA8/y6FLo8h05hY/s1600/dumping+station+small.jpg" /></a></div>Anderson proposes that instead of taking a scientific approach, we can just "throw the numbers" into a machine and through computational alchemy transform data into knowledge. (Similar thinking shows up in commonplace references to "crunching" numbers, a metaphor I have <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2006/03/i-dont-crunch-numbers.html">previously criticized</a>.) The suggestion that we should "forget" the theory developed by experts in the relevant field seems particularly unwise. Theory and expert opinion are always imperfect, but that doesn't mean they should be casually discarded.<br /><br />Anderson's faith in big data and blind computing power can be challenged on several grounds. Take <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias">selection bias</a>, which can play havoc with predictions. As an example, consider the political poll conducted by <a href="http://www.math.uah.edu/stat/data/LiteraryDigest.html">The Literary Digest</a> magazine, just before the 1936 presidential election. The magazine sent out 10 million postcard questionnaires to its subscribers, and received about 2.3 million back. In 1936, <i>that</i> was big data. The results clearly pointed to a victory by the republican challenger, Alf Landon. In fact, Franklin Delano Roosevelt won by a landslide. The likely explanation for this colossal failure: for one thing, subscribers to The Literary Digest were not representative of the voting population of the United States; for another, the 23% who responded to the questionnaire were likely quite different from those who did not. This double dose of selection bias resulted in a very unreliable prediction. Today, national opinion polls typically survey <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_opinion_polling_for_the_United_States_presidential_election,_2012">between 500 and 3000 people</a>, but those people are selected randomly and great efforts are expended to avoid bias. The moral of this story is that, contrary to the hype, bigger data is not necessarily better data. Carefully designed data collection can trump sheer volume of data. Of course it all depends on the situation. <br /><br />Selection biases can also be induced during data analysis when cases with missing data are excluded, since the pattern of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_data">missingness</a> often carries information. More generally, bias can creep into results in any number of ways, and <a href="http://www.dorak.info/epi/bc.html">extensive lists</a> of biases have been compiled. One important source of bias is the well-known principle of Garbage In Garbage Out. Anderson refers to measurements taken with "unprecedented fidelity". It is true that in some areas, impressive technical improvements in certain measurement have been made, but data quality issues are much broader and are usually problematic. Data quality issues can never be ignored, and can sometimes completely derail an analysis. <br /><br />Another limitation of Anderson's vision concerns the goals of data analysis. When the goal is prediction, it may be quite sufficient to algorithmically sift through correlations between variables. Notwithstanding the previously noted hazards of prediction, such an approach can be very effective. But data analysis is not always about prediction. Sometimes we wish to draw conclusions about the <i>causes</i> of phenomena. Such <a href="http://csm.lshtm.ac.uk/themes/causal-inference/"><i>causal inference</i></a> is best achieved through experimentation, but here a problem arises: big data is mostly observational. Anderson tries to sidestep this by claiming that with enough data "Correlation is enough":<br /><blockquote class="tr_bq"><i>Correlation supersedes causation, and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all.</i></blockquote><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JC-PM6l_BdE/T9NKAOy77AI/AAAAAAAAA_o/idfMUjxofR0/s1600/confounding+diagram+version+3+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JC-PM6l_BdE/T9NKAOy77AI/AAAAAAAAA_o/idfMUjxofR0/s1600/confounding+diagram+version+3+small.jpg" /></a></div>But on the contrary, investigations of cause and effect (mechanistic explanations) are central to both natural and social science. And in applied fields such as government policy, it is often of fundamental importance to understand the likely effect of interventions. Correlations alone don't answer such questions. Suppose, for example, there is a correlation between A and B. Does A affect B? Does B affect A? Does some third factor C affect both A and B? This last situation is known as confounding (for a good introduction, see <a href="http://www.maths.bris.ac.uk/%7Emaxvd/Consilience_Did.pdf">this article</a> [pdf]). A classic example concerns a positive correlation between the number of drownings each month and ice cream sales. Of course this is not a causal relationship. The confounding factor here is the season: during the warmer periods of the year when people consume more ice cream, there are far more water activities and hence drownings. When a confounding factor is not taken into account, estimates of the effect of one factor on another may be biased. Worse, this bias does not go away as the quantity of data increases—big data can't help us here. Finally, confounding cannot be handled automatically; expert input is indispensable in any kind of causal analysis. We can't do without theory.<br /><br />Big data affords many new possibilities. But just being big does not eliminate the problems that have plagued the analysis of much smaller data sets. Appropriate use of data still requires careful thought—about both the content area of interest and the best tool for the job. <br /><br /><b>Thinking about Data</b><br /><br />It is also useful to think more broadly about the <i>concept</i> of data. Let's start with an examination of the word <i>data</i> itself, to see what baggage it carries. <br /><br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8m7gVHqpPRU/T8K2Yf9HIBI/AAAAAAAAA_E/WNXoPr_UWvo/s1600/The+Data+Age.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8m7gVHqpPRU/T8K2Yf9HIBI/AAAAAAAAA_E/WNXoPr_UWvo/s1600/The+Data+Age.jpg" /></a>We are inconsistent in how we talk about data. The words data and information are often used synonymously (think of "data processing" and "information processing"). Notions of an information hierarchy have been around for a long time. One model goes by the acronym <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIKW">DIKW</a>, representing an ordered progression from Data to Information to Knowledge and eventually Wisdom. Ultimately, these are epistemological questions, and easy answers are illusory.<br /><br />Nevertheless, if what we mean by data is the kind of thing stored on a memory stick, then data can be meaningless noise, the draft of a novel, a pop song, the genome of a virus, a blurry photo taken by a cellphone, or a business's sales records. Each of these types of information and an endless variety of others can be stored in digital memory: on one level all data are equivalent. Indeed the mathematical field of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_theory">information theory</a> sets aside the meaning or content of data, and focuses entirely on questions about encoding and communicating information. In the same spirit, Chris Anderson argues that we need "to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later."<br /><br />But when we consider the use of data, it makes no sense to think of all data as equivalent. The complete lyrics of all of the songs by the Beatles is not the same as a CT scan. Data are of use to us when they are "about" something. In philosophy this is the concept of intentionality, which is an aspect of consciousness. By themselves, the data on my memory stick have no meaning. A human consciousness must engage with the data for them to be meaningful. When this takes place, a complex web of contextual elements come into play. Depending on who is reading them, the Beatles' lyrics may call to mind the music, the cultural references, the history of rock and roll, and diverse personal associations. A radiologist who examines a CT scan will recognize various anatomical features and perhaps concerning signs of pathology. Judgements of quality may also arise, whether in mistranscribed lyrics or a poorly performed CT scan.<br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eWekWwGT2TA/T9qAfbIewLI/AAAAAAAABAc/c4VD9kmOiRQ/s1600/camera+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-eWekWwGT2TA/T9qAfbIewLI/AAAAAAAABAc/c4VD9kmOiRQ/s1600/camera+small.jpg" /></a>The word <i>data</i> is the plural of the Latin word <i>datum</i>, meaning "something given". So the data are the "givens" in a problem. But in many cases, it might be helpful to think of data as <i>taken</i> rather than <i>given</i>. For example, when you take a photograph, you have a purpose in mind, you <i>actively</i> choose a scene, include some features and exclude others, adjust the settings of the camera. The quality of the resulting image depends on how steady your hand is, how knowledgeable you are of the principles of photography. Even when a photograph is literally given to you by someone else, it was still <i>taken</i> by <i>somebody</i>. The camera never lies, but the photograph may be misunderstood or misrepresented.<br /><br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jsWOCsqhyaI/T9VZUdlq4II/AAAAAAAAA_8/HC7GSYfKoxo/s1600/data+as+a+gift+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jsWOCsqhyaI/T9VZUdlq4II/AAAAAAAAA_8/HC7GSYfKoxo/s1600/data+as+a+gift+small.jpg" /></a>When a gift is given to you, it is easy to default to the <i>passive</i> role of recipient. The details of how the gift was selected and acquired may be entirely unknown to you. A dealer in fine art would carefully investigate a newly acquired work to determine its provenance and authenticity. Similarly, when you receive data from an outside source, it is important to take an active role. At the very least, you should ask questions. Chris Anderson claims that "With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves." But on their own, the numbers never speak for themselves, any more than a painting stolen during WWII will whisper the secret of its rightful ownership. One common source of received data today is administrative data, that is, data collected as part of an organization's routine operations. Rather than taking such data at face value, it is important to investigate the underlying processes and context.<br /><br />It is also possible to make use of received data to <i>design</i> a study. For example, to investigate the effect of a certain exposure, cases of a rare outcome may be selected from a data set and matched with controls, that is individuals who are similar except that they did not experience that outcome. (This is a matched case-control study.) Appropriate care must be taken in how the cases and controls are selected, and in ensuring that any selection effects in the original database do not translate into bias in the analysis. Tools for the valid and efficient analysis of such <i>observational</i> studies have been investigated by epidemiologists and statisticians for over 50 years.<br /><br />When we collect the data ourselves, we have an opportunity to take an active role from the start. In an experiment, we manipulate independent variables and measure the resulting values of dependent variables. Careful experimental design lets us accurately and efficiently obtain results. In many cases, however, true experiments are not possible. Instead, observational studies, where there is no manipulation of independent variables, are used. Numerous designs for observational studies exist, including case-control (as mentioned above), cohort, and cross-sectional. Again, careful design is vital to avoid bias, and to efficiently obtain results.<br /><br /><b>Conclusion</b><br /><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JYzl8AwfySQ/T9qD2kcrmWI/AAAAAAAABAo/3nIJH_kVvNI/s1600/popcorn+popper+small.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-JYzl8AwfySQ/T9qD2kcrmWI/AAAAAAAABAo/3nIJH_kVvNI/s1600/popcorn+popper+small.jpg" /></a></div>Excitement over a new development<i>—</i>be it a discovery, a trend, or a way of thinking<i>—</i>can sometimes spill over, like popcorn jumping from a popper. This may give rise to related, but nevertheless distinct ideas. In the heat of the excitement (and not infrequently a good deal of hype), it's important to evaluate the quality of the ideas. Exaggerated claims may not be hard to identify, but they are also frequently pardoned as merely an excess of enthusiasm.<br /><br />Still, the underlying bad idea may, in subtler form, gradually gain acceptance. The costs may only be appreciated much later. Today it is easy to see how damaging ideas like social Darwinism<i>—</i>the malignant offspring of a very good idea<i>—</i>proved to be. But at the time, it may have seemed like a plausible extrapolation from a brilliant new theory.<br /><br />The role of data in our societies and our own lives is becoming increasingly central. We live in a world where the quantity of data is exploding and truly gargantuan data sets are being generated and analyzed. But it is important that we not become hypnotized by their immensity. It is all too easy to see data as somehow magical, and to imagine that big data combined with computational brute force will overcome all obstacles.<br /><br />Let's enjoy the popcorn<i>—</i>but turn down the heat a little.&nbsp; <br /><br />_____________________________<small>&nbsp;</small><br /><small>1. <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=18992864" name="ref1"></a><a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2012/06/rethinking-data.html#backref1">^</a>In this post, I won't worry too much about whether to treat data as singular or plural. It strikes me as a little bit like the question of whether to talk about bacteria or a bacterium. While the distinction is sometimes important, people can get awfully hung up on it, with little benefit.&nbsp;</small><br /><small>2.</small><small> <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2012/06/rethinking-data.html" name="ref2"></a><a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.ca/2012/06/rethinking-data.html#backref2">^</a></small><small> See this interesting <a href="http://whatsthebigdata.com/2012/04/26/a-very-short-history-of-data-science/">history of data science</a>.&nbsp;</small>http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2012/06/rethinking-data.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-5866015594136744218Fri, 30 Sep 2011 02:53:00 +00002011-09-30T07:15:50.658-04:00placeboToo much of nothing<b>Is more placebo better?</b> <object width="526" height="374"><param name="movie" value="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true" /><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"/><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><param name="bgColor" value="#ffffff"></param><param name="flashvars" value="vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2011G/Blank/BenGoldacre_2011G-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/BenGoldacre_2011-embed.jpg&vw=512&vh=288&ap=0&ti=1234&lang=eng&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science;year=2011;theme=a_taste_of_tedglobal_2011;theme=bold_predictions_stern_warnings;theme=food_matters;event=TEDGlobal+2011;tag=Science;tag=illness;tag=illusion;tag=medicine;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;" /><embed src="http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf" pluginspace="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" bgColor="#ffffff" width="526" height="374" allowFullScreen="true" allowScriptAccess="always" flashvars="vu=http://video.ted.com/talk/stream/2011G/Blank/BenGoldacre_2011G-320k.mp4&su=http://images.ted.com/images/ted/tedindex/embed-posters/BenGoldacre_2011-embed.jpg&vw=512&vh=288&ap=0&ti=1234&lang=eng&introDuration=15330&adDuration=4000&postAdDuration=830&adKeys=talk=ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science;year=2011;theme=a_taste_of_tedglobal_2011;theme=bold_predictions_stern_warnings;theme=food_matters;event=TEDGlobal+2011;tag=Science;tag=illness;tag=illusion;tag=medicine;&preAdTag=tconf.ted/embed;tile=1;sz=512x288;"></embed></object> <p>A friend of mine pointed me to the above TED talk, by Ben Goldacre. It's a entertaining presentation with lots of interesting content, although Goldacre's discussion of the placebo effect&mdash;"one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine" (6:32)&mdash;is a little weak. At 6:47, he says:<blockquote><i>We know for example that two sugar pills a day are a more effective treatment for getting rid of gastric ulcers than one sugar pill a day. Two sugar pills a day beats one pill a day. And that's an outrageous and ridiculous finding, but it's true.</i></blockquote>Notice that the claim is not about <i>pain</i>, but about actually <i>healing</i> the ulcers. <p>The source of this claim is apparently a 1999 study by de Craen and co-authors titled "Placebo effect in the treatment of duodenal ulcer" [<a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2014313/">free full text/pdf</a>]. It's a systematic review based on 79 randomized trials comparing various drugs to placebo, taken either four times a day or twice a day depending on the study. (Note that Goldacre refers to twice a day versus once a day; I'm uncertain of the reason for the difference.) From each trial, the authors extracted the results in the placebo group only, obtaining the following results:<blockquote><i>The pooled 4 week healing rate of the 51 trials with a four times a day regimen was 44.2% (805 of 1821 patients) compared with 36.2% (545 of 1504 patients) in the 28 trials with a twice a day regimen</i></blockquote>This 8% difference was statistically significant, and remained so even when several different statistical models were used. <p>However, the authors are up-front about a key limitation of the study: "We realize that the comparison was based on nonrandomized data." Even though the data were obtained from <i>randomized</i> trials, none of the trials individually compared a four-times-a-day placebo regimen to a twice-a-day placebo regimen, so the analysis is a <i>nonrandomized</i> comparison. What if there were important differences between the patients, the study procedures, or the overall medical care provided in the four-times-a-day trials and the two-times-a-day trials? The authors discuss various attempts to adjust for gender, age, smoking, and type of comparator drug, but report that this made little difference. But they acknowledge that:<blockquote><i>Although we adjusted for a number of possible confounders, we can not rule out that in this nonrandomized comparison the observed difference was caused by some unrecognized confounding factor or factors.</i></blockquote>The strength of a <i>randomized</i> comparison is that important differences between groups are unlikely&mdash;even when it comes to <i>unrecognized</i> factors. Although the authors go on to consider other possible biases, their bottom line is:<blockquote><i>... we speculate that the difference between regimens was induced by the difference in frequency of placebo administration.</i></blockquote>These results of this study are intriguing, but they're hardly definitive. http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2011/09/too-much-of-nothing.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-5962407194416188320Sun, 25 Sep 2011 13:04:00 +00002011-09-25T15:34:43.611-04:00clinical trialplaceboThe placebo defect<div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; CLEAR: both" class="separator"><a style="MARGIN-BOTTOM: 1em; FLOAT: left; CLEAR: left; MARGIN-RIGHT: 1em" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eOVjkHCs3D0/Tn3VzrH5DvI/AAAAAAAAA4w/KdC26QyTgEU/s1600/pill.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-eOVjkHCs3D0/Tn3VzrH5DvI/AAAAAAAAA4w/KdC26QyTgEU/s1600/pill.jpg" /></a></div>Suppose a clinical trial randomizes 100 patients to receive an experimental drug in the form of pills and an equal number of patients to receive identical pills except that they contain no active ingredient, that is, placebo. The results of the trial are as follows: 60 of the patients who received the experimental drug improved, compared to 30 of the patients who received the placebo. The drug clearly works better than the placebo.<a name="backref1"></a><a href="#ref1">[1]</a> But 30% of the patients who received the placebo did get better. There seems to be a placebo effect, right?<br /><br />Wrong. The results from this trial provide no information about whether or not there is a placebo effect. To determine whether there is a placebo effect you would need compare the outcomes of patients who received placebo with the outcomes of patients who received no treatment. And not surprisingly, trials with a no-treatment arm are quite rare.<br /><br />But there are some. In a landmark paper published in the <em>New England Journal of Medicine</em> in 2001 (<a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJM200105243442106">free full text</a>), Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter Gøtzsche identified 130 trials in which patients were randomly assigned to either placebo or no treatment. Their conclusions?<blockquote><i>We found little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects. Although placebos had no significant effects on objective or binary outcomes, they had possible small benefits in studies with continuous subjective outcomes and for the treatment of pain.</i></blockquote>How could that be? Returning to our hypothetical trial, recall that among the patients who received placebo, 30% improved. The question is, how many would have improved had they not received placebo? If the answer is 10%, then there is 20% placebo effect. But if the answer is 30%, then there is no placebo effect at all. What Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche found was that in most cases there was no significant placebo effect. The exception&mdash;and it is an interesting one&mdash;was in studies with continuous subjective outcomes and for the treatment of pain. It is not hard to imagine how a placebo effect could operate in such cases. The expectation of an effect can strongly influence an individual's subjective experience and assessment of pain, satisfaction, and so forth.<br /><br />A <a href="http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1103319">study</a> published this summer provides a nice illustration. Weschler and colleagues randomized patients with asthma to receive an inhaler containing a bronchodilator medication (albuterol), a placebo inhaler, sham acupuncture, or no intervention. When patients were asked to rate their improvement, the results were as follows:<br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; CLEAR: both" class="separator"><a style="MARGIN-LEFT: 1em; MARGIN-RIGHT: 1em" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4hZMqzSa1Rg/Tn8ekmUqTpI/AAAAAAAAA44/0fTciHetR90/s1600/subjective.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4hZMqzSa1Rg/Tn8ekmUqTpI/AAAAAAAAA44/0fTciHetR90/s1600/subjective.jpg" /></a></div>Self-rated improvement was similar between the active-medication, placebo, and sham-acupuncture groups, and significantly greater than in the no-intervention group.<br /><br />When an objective measure of respiratory function (maximum forced expiratory volume in 1 second, FEV<sub>1</sub>) was made, the results were as follows:<br /><br /><div style="TEXT-ALIGN: center; CLEAR: both" class="separator"><a style="MARGIN-LEFT: 1em; MARGIN-RIGHT: 1em" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GwGjQBdpB3g/Tn8eFVYHchI/AAAAAAAAA40/KwpVosifVfk/s1600/fev1.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GwGjQBdpB3g/Tn8eFVYHchI/AAAAAAAAA40/KwpVosifVfk/s1600/fev1.jpg" /></a></div><br />The objective measure of improvement was similar between the placebo, sham-acupuncture, and no-intervention groups, and significantly less than in the active-medication group.<br /><br />At least in this study, it appears that a placebo effect can operate when the outcome of interest is self-rated improvement, but not when an objective outcome is used. This finding is in accordance with what Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche originally reported, as well with an update of their review published in 2004 (<a href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2796.2004.01355.x/abstract;jsessionid=60551DE8732F443405EDAFFF8DAA764D.d01t02">free pdf</a>).<br /><br />Indeed the notion of a placebo effect in the case of objectively-measured outcomes has always seemed a little shaky, and the putative mechanisms rather speculative. So why has the placebo effect commanded so much attention? <br /><br /><strong>Fascination with the placebo effect</strong><br /><br />Although placebos had probably been used clinically long before<a name="backref2"></a><a href="#ref2">[2]</a>, it was a 1955 paper published in the <em>Journal of the American Medical Association </em>by Henry Beecher titled <a href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/159/17/1602.short">The Powerful Placebo</a>, that brought widespread attention to the placebo effect. Beecher's analysis of 15 placebo-controlled trials for a variety of conditions showed that 35% of the patients who received placebo improved and he referred to this as "real therapeutic effects" of placebo. As discussed above, this mistakenly attributes clinical improvement among patients who received placebo to an effect of the placebo itself, without considering other possible causes such as the natural course of the illness. Unfortunately Beecher's error was not widely understood, and the mystique of the placebo was cemented.<br /><br />Over the years, the placebo effect has received a tremendous amount of attention in both the academic and popular press. A <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=placebo%20effect[Title]">search of PubMed</a>, a publicly-accessible database of citations of biomedical publications, reveals 527 publications with the words "placebo effect" in the title, going back to 1953. This number is particularly impressive given that not all articles on the topic—for instance, Beecher's paper itself—include the words "placebo effect" in their title. A Google search of "placebo effect" reports "about 5,220,000 results". Why has so much attention been given to such a dubious notion?<br /><br />One reason may be our fascination with mind-body interactions. Conventional medicine, perhaps influenced by the philosophy of René Descartes, has tended to treat the mind and body as entirely separate. It is clear that this is not so, perhaps most obviously in regards to mental health. Perhaps in reaction, some fuzzy thinking has developed around the idea of mind-body interactions. New-age and alternative-medicine movements have often entailed beliefs about how positive attitudes can heal the body, and conversely how negative ones can lead to illness. While this may contain elements of truth, at its worst it fosters dogmatic thinking and pseudoscience.<br /><br />Curiously, however, in more scientific circles recent developments in neurobiology have also encouraged interest in the placebo effect. Advances in understanding of how the brain works have lead to research efforts to understand the mechanism of action of the placebo effect. This is more than a little odd, given the fairly sparse evidence for such an effect! An <a href="http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all">article in Wired Magazine</a> asserts that "The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health—the so-called placebo effect—has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology." Note that the article takes for granted "the fact" that the placebo effect works. <br /><br />Indeed, the term "the placebo effect" itself is part of the problem. By labeling it as an effect, we lend it credence. Arguing against the placebo effect seems to put one at an immediate disadvantage. Hasn't everyone heard of the placebo effect? How could anyone deny such an established fact?<br /><br />______________________________<br /><small>1. <a name="ref1"></a><a href="#backref1">^</a>Relative to the sample size, the difference is large enough that we can safely rule out chance as an explanation. In statistical terms, a test of the hypothesis that the improvement rates in the two groups are equal using Fisher's exact test gives a p-value &lt; 0.001.<br />2. <a name="ref2"></a><a href="#backref2">^</a>For some historical background, see The Problematic Placebo, by Stanley Scheindlin [<a href="http://www.jgh.ca/uploads/Psychiatry/Links/108.full.pdf">pdf</a>].</small>http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2011/09/placebo-defect.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)36tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-3730178744462637795Sat, 27 Aug 2011 13:17:00 +00002011-08-28T18:12:29.966-04:00Rethinking property<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rtwAzmbUmeg/TljuiU_ZR7I/AAAAAAAAA4U/7YxFv5Z2r4I/s1600/solitaire.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; WIDTH: 300px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 225px; CURSOR: pointer" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645524406426486706" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rtwAzmbUmeg/TljuiU_ZR7I/AAAAAAAAA4U/7YxFv5Z2r4I/s400/solitaire.jpg" /></a>Suppose Alison has been playing a game of solitaire, but has left the room. A little while later, Trevor, aged 4, notices the cards lying on the table and reaches for them. Another member of the family calls out, "Trevor, don't touch those, they're Alison's!" A straightforward case of teaching a young person about property rights, isn't it?
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<br />Perhaps not. The deck of cards may belong to the family rather than just Alison. And in any case, it's really not the <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">ownership</span> of the cards themselves that's the issue, it's their arrangement on the table. If that arrangement is significantly disturbed<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic"></span>, the game will be ruined even if the cards themselves are not at all damaged. So why do we construe this as an issue of property rights?
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<br />I believe the reason is that we find it much easier to express property claims than to describe the real issue, which is respect for other people. Perhaps we might have said, "Trevor, don't touch those, Alison is playing a game of solitaire!" The trouble is, Trevor may not know what solitaire is, or what that has to do with touching the cards. In fact, it may not even be clear that Alison is still playing. Perhaps she got tired of playing, and just abandoned the game. In that case, the arrangement of the cards wouldn't matter to her—but more about that later. Suffice it to say that the complexities in this and many other situations can easily get out of hand, and we fall back on the simple formulation: "Don't touch that, it's not yours."
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<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Hx9jWkF8H0/TlllNs7bGnI/AAAAAAAAA4c/fOzgVHuFx4I/s1600/property.jpg"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 205px; CURSOR: pointer" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645654893958732402" border="0" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5Hx9jWkF8H0/TlllNs7bGnI/AAAAAAAAA4c/fOzgVHuFx4I/s320/property.jpg" /></a>Unfortunately, we tend to get fooled by our own <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2010/12/oversimplification.html">simplification</a>. In the Western tradition of political philosophy, property rights have been a central focus, as exemplified by the writing of thinkers like Hobbes and Locke. Today many see the notion of property rights as a sacrosanct and even supreme principle. But this obsession with private property has its costs. If access to resources depends on ownership, then it is natural to equate property with security. This psychological dynamic plays out in individual obsession with accumulation. On a broader scale, our economic systems emphasize that continual growth is the only option. Considerations of sustainability are given little attention.
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<br /><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jLjkO0UCFpQ/Tlp7P_7IlbI/AAAAAAAAA4k/xjjIFeAQ3-4/s1600/whoever%2Bdies%2Bwith%2Bthe%2Bmost%2Btoys.JPG"><img style="MARGIN: 0px 10px 10px 0px; WIDTH: 320px; FLOAT: left; HEIGHT: 222px; CURSOR: hand" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5645960597650052530" border="0" alt="" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jLjkO0UCFpQ/Tlp7P_7IlbI/AAAAAAAAA4k/xjjIFeAQ3-4/s320/whoever%2Bdies%2Bwith%2Bthe%2Bmost%2Btoys.JPG" /></a>The limitations of the private property model are readily apparent when it comes to land. Suppose you own a piece of land with a beautiful tree on it. I own adjacent land which I dig up, and in so doing I damage the roots of the tree so that it dies. Similarly, if I pollute my land with toxic chemicals, they may seep into nearby land and water. If I dump radioactive waste on my land, even if nearby areas are unaffected, the land may be rendered permanently unusable. Long after my life has passed, my footprint on the planet may continue. Such considerations lead to ideas of stewardship, which have a long history. The notion that property comes with responsibility seems to be an attempt to mitigate the more anti-social tendencies that ownership can promote.
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<br />Of course in the short term, stewardship may be motivated by self interest. A classic scenario that examines these issues is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons">the tragedy of the commons</a>. Suppose there is pasture land where people take their cattle to graze. It has been argued that if the land is held in common, it will be overused and the land will be exhausted—to everyone's detriment. If the land is privately held, the owner has an interest in wise use of the land. This scenario has connections to the history of English agriculture and the enclosure of public lands, but the interpretation continues to be debated. Furthermore, the supposed wise use of a resource by a single owner has plenty of counter examples. Particularly in the case of non-renewable resources, the use is often anything but wise.
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<br />Let us now return to the case of Alison and Trevor. Alison left the room, but did she intend to return to her game? If she didn't then by leaving the cards lying on the table she isn't exercising good stewardship over <em>the cards themselves</em>. If anyone else wants to play another game or use the table for a different purpose, they'll first have to tidy up the cards. The ownership of the cards (or the table) is not the main point. Instead, the key issue is respect for other people.
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<br />More broadly speaking, conflicts that are framed as property issues often go far beyond ownership and involve more fundamental issues of respect, tolerance, and basic human needs. Our society's traditions, conventions, and language can easily corral us into thinking that property rights are supreme. As we go through life, and as we raise our children, we should keep this in mind.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2011/08/rethinking-property.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)62tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-3008435747630936957Sat, 13 Aug 2011 00:49:00 +00002011-08-12T23:13:56.058-04:00probabilityThe landscape of probability<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PJZMFkXZxwU/TkXpkDXg4_I/AAAAAAAAA4M/TqoFVrpDaoE/s1600/wanderer.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 310px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PJZMFkXZxwU/TkXpkDXg4_I/AAAAAAAAA4M/TqoFVrpDaoE/s400/wanderer.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5640170913939907570" border="0" /></a>
<br />We all know that the probability of some condition can lie anywhere between a <i>sure thing</i> (which we represent as a probability of 1) and a flat-out impossibility (0). But it turns out there are several other points of interest along the way. Let's take a tour.
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<br />When we say that something is a sure thing, we mean it is bound to be so. For example, the probability that a bachelor is unmarried is 1. This is a <i>logical sure thing</i> because, by the definition of 'bachelor', it couldn't be otherwise. (It could also be called an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apodicticity">apodictic</a> sure thing, however that's <i>pretty much guaranteed</i> to sound pretentious—but I'm getting ahead of myself.) Now consider the statement that an object with a positive electrical charge is attracted to an object with a negative electrical charge. This is a <i>physical sure thing</i>: though there may be a universe where this isn't true, it is true in ours.
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<br />Now let's move from <i>sure things</i> to things that are <i>pretty much guaranteed</i>. For example, it's pretty much guaranteed that the sun will rise tomorrow. Not a sure thing though: who knows what strange astronomical events might come to pass overnight? More about this in moment.
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<br />Nevertheless, most of the time, when we think about things that we consider <i>likely</i>, we're not thinking of things that are so overwhelmingly likely as the sun rising tomorrow. Likely things just have <i>better than even odds</i>.
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<br /><i>Even odds</i> (a probability of ½) is of course the sweet spot where the probability of some condition is exactly equal to the probability of its opposite. This can be interpreted as an expression of perfect uncertainty about the condition, and this was how Pierre-Simon Laplace used it in working out a solution to the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sunrise_problem">Sunrise problem</a>.
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<br />But as we continue our stroll, we find ourselves in the realm of <i>unlikely</i> things. Note that they don't have to be terribly unlikely. Something with a probability of 0.49 is (just slightly) unlikely, in that it has <i>worse than even odds</i>.
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<br />As the probabilities get thinner and thinner, we soon find ourselves encountering things that <i>ain't gonna happen</i>. These are the opposite of <i>sure things</i>. I'd love to win $50,000,000 in the lottery, but it ain't gonna happen. Well, of course it is gonna happen, but not to me (in all likelihood). Not that it's a <i>physical impossiblity</i> of course, much less a <i>logical impossibility</i>.
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<br />I'd just have to be awfully lucky.
<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BhCiyEUofN4/TkXmC5ZChJI/AAAAAAAAA30/Wk4fYkJpJQw/s1600/probability.jpg"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 319px; height: 320px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-BhCiyEUofN4/TkXmC5ZChJI/AAAAAAAAA30/Wk4fYkJpJQw/s320/probability.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5640167045791384722" border="0" /></a>http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2011/08/landscape-of-probability.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-1991645683746171279Thu, 02 Jun 2011 00:39:00 +00002011-06-06T07:29:14.420-04:00phenomenologytelevisionThe fragmentary nature of television<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bELy8dZ5R2w/Tebh9iVS2KI/AAAAAAAAA3g/7ViJ9uQM0EE/s1600/broken-tv.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px 10px 10px 0px; width: 200px; float: left; height: 184px;" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5613422432868292770" alt="" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bELy8dZ5R2w/Tebh9iVS2KI/AAAAAAAAA3g/7ViJ9uQM0EE/s200/broken-tv.jpg" border="0" /></a>For the past couple of months, I've been reading, and thinking about <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_%28philosophy%29">phenomenology</a>, a philosophical movement concerned with the nature of conscious experience. My guide has been the wonderful <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Phenomenology-Robert-Sokolowski/dp/0521667925">Introduction to Phenomenology</a> by Robert Sokolowski. I haven't found it easy to understand phenomenology, nor have I found it easy to explain to other people, but I am finding it to be a very rich source of insight. As I was watching a television show the other night (Vampire Diaries, if you must know), I suddenly made a connection with something I had read in Sokolowski's book:<blockquote><i>One of the dangers we face is that with the technological expansion of images and words, everything seems to fall apart into mere appearances. ... it seems that we now are flooded by fragments without any wholes, by manifolds bereft of identities, and by multiple absences without any enduring real presence. We have <b>bricolage</b> and nothing else, and we think we can even invent ourselves at random by assembling convenient and pleasing but transient identities out of the bits and pieces we find around us.</i></blockquote>It struck me that television is a perfect example of this point. Now it's easy to criticize TV, but my main goal here is to <i>understand</i> a particular aspect of television, its fragmentary nature. If we can better understand the phenomenon of television in our culture, we may be able to approach it more wisely.<br /><br />Perhaps the most fragmented experience of television is channel surfing—a series of disconnected images, sounds, and representations—a toothpaste commercial / a football game / a lion in a savannah / a riot / a soap opera / ... But even when one stays on one channel, watching television is a fragmented experience. Camera angles switch constantly, and our attention is distracted by commercials, and sometimes streaming lines of news updates and stock prices at the bottom of the screen.<br /><br />But the fragmentation runs much deeper. Consider the constructed narrative of reality TV, a Frankenstein's monster of dismembered and reassembled footage. More fragmented still is one of the parents of reality TV: the news. Like reality TV, a television news segment consists of a patchwork of content assembled to tell a story. A number of these segments are themselves assembled into a news broadcast. Allowing time for advertisements, and to keep things lively, each segment is typically only a few minutes long. What gets left out is <i>context</i>: current events are presented with a minimum of historical, political, and cultural background.<br /><br />As another example, consider the situation comedy. Granted, this is fiction designed to entertain, and the outlandish characters and situations sitcoms portray are not meant to be taken seriously. Such elements are easily set aside. What is more disconcerting is some of the elements that at first sight seem more mundane. While sitcoms often represent people in apparently ordinary situations, there are jarring absences. For example in some sitcoms nobody seems to have to work. In others, ordinary standards of politeness don't seem to apply. Bizarrely, a laugh track is added in place of an absent audience. Episodes are totally disconnected from each other, so that events have no long-term consequences. One-dimensional characters substitute for authentic identities. It is as if the characters are trapped in an endless loop, condemned to repeatedly play out their fates under a variety of starting conditions, never learning, never changing.<br /><br />The examples go on. Consider sports on television. Or dramas. Or talk shows. In each case, we can see "fragments without any wholes ... manifolds bereft of identities ... multiple absences without any enduring real presence."<br /><br />Sokolowski argues that because of this "we think we can even invent ourselves at random by assembling convenient and pleasing but transient identities out of the bits and pieces we find around us." Is he right? Does the fragmentary nature of television lead to a fragmented sense of ourselves? And if so, what is the impact?http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2011/06/fragmentary-nature-of-television.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-2038835604597739108Sun, 30 Jan 2011 22:50:00 +00002011-01-31T23:08:08.699-05:00causalitylanguageCausal language<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TUXrYL2r1OI/AAAAAAAAA20/gVEoTMooE18/s1600/escher%2Bhands"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 333px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TUXrYL2r1OI/AAAAAAAAA20/gVEoTMooE18/s400/escher%2Bhands" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568115315045029090" /></a>Consider the following sentence: "<b>You ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained."</b> What is odd about it is that ordinarily, when we say "X because of Y" we mean "Y is the cause of X". For example, "The window broke because the baseball hit it" means that the baseball hitting the window caused it to break. But in this case, the sentence surely doesn't mean that your fingers being stained caused you to eat the blueberries. Now one might object that it's a weird sentence, and that instead it <i>should</i> be "<b><i>I believe</i> you ate the blueberries because your fingers are stained.</b>" But the original version is not confusing to an English speaker, and people sometimes do speak this way. Language is a complicated business. And language about <i>causality</i> is particularly tricky.<br /><br />It is well known that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation">correlation does not imply causation</a>. But when scientific studies are reported in the media, this dictum is often forgotten. Professor Jon Mueller at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois has compiled a great <a href="http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/100/correlation_or_causation.htm">set of links</a> to news articles reporting scientific findings. Some of the headlines for these articles suggest causal relationships and some do not. Clicking through to the actual news articles shows that the purported causal relationships are often a stretch, to say the least. For example:<blockquote><a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2954294120071030?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews">TV raises blood pressure in obese kids: study</a><br /></blockquote>The news article reports that:<blockquote><i>The researchers found children who watched two to four hours of TV were 2.5 times more likely to have high blood pressure compared with those who watched less than two hours of television a day. Those who watched more than 4 hours per day were 3.3 times more likely to have hypertension.</i></blockquote>In other words this was an observational study, which established a <i>correlation</i> between watching high amounts of TV per day and having high blood pressure. Contrary to the headline, the study did not show that the TV watching was the <i>cause</i> of the high blood pressure. For convenience let's rework the headline, while preserving its causal sense:<blockquote>TV watching increases the probability of high blood pressure. (1)</blockquote>The causal implication can be removed by writing:<blockquote>TV watchers have higher probability of high blood pressure. (2)</blockquote>In a wiki entry on <a href="http://www.optimizelife.com/wiki/Causal_language">causal language</a> Gustavo Lacerda points out that action words often express causality. Note that in the present example, in order to remove the causal aspect of (1), it was necessary to change the verb "watching" into the noun "watchers" and the verb "increases" into the noun "higher". <br /><br />Interestingly, there is a Bayesian formulation that sounds closer to (1):<blockquote>Being a TV watcher increases the probability that a child has high blood pressure.</blockquote>Note that this version has the verb "increases", like (1), but not the verb "watching". Instead it's expressed as "being a TV watcher", which indicates group membership rather than action or choice. It is this information about group membership that is used to update the probability of high blood pressure, following the Bayesian recipe.<br /> <br /><b>Prediction and causality</b><br /><br />Prediction can sound a lot like causation. Consider this statement:<blockquote>If you exercise, you're less likely to have a heart attack. (3)</blockquote>Does this mean:<blockquote>People who exercise are less likely than people who don't to have a heart attack. (4)</blockquote>or does it mean:<blockquote>The act of exercising reduces your chances of having a heart attack. (5)</blockquote>It seems quite ambiguous. On the one hand, "if you exercise" sounds like a statement about your choice simply to exercise instead of not exercising, which supports interpretation (5). On the other hand, "if you exercise" identifies you as a person who exercises, and that may predict your risk of heart attack, perhaps due to another behaviour common among people who exercise, such as healthy eating. This would support interpretation (4).<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TUeDfVg-VvI/AAAAAAAAA3U/fOVEeCfOgKc/s1600/crystal%2Bball"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 199px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TUeDfVg-VvI/AAAAAAAAA3U/fOVEeCfOgKc/s200/crystal%2Bball" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568564038641538802" /></a>Natural language allows ambiguities. It's convenient to leave things out because everyone knows what we mean. Don't they? Not necessarily. Certainly, when it comes to causality, ambiguity can lead to a mess of trouble. In ordinary speech, the distinction between correlation and causation is often blurred. Statement (3) above is ambiguous about the comparator: less likely than <i>whom</i> to have a heart attack? Less likely than people who don't exercise? Less likely than you would be if you chose not to exercise? <br /><br />It seems to me that causal language is almost a worst-case scenario. Many people would see the concern as unimportant. And yet evidence and beliefs about causation are at the foundation of any intervention, whether in health care, education, social programs, economics, what have you. The media and politicians routinely use misleading causal language. But it's difficult even when we try to be clear!<br /><br /><b>Sweetness and life</b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TUeCO44j-9I/AAAAAAAAA3M/lJhyoFitwPo/s1600/color_candies%2Bscaled2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 179px; height: 134px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TUeCO44j-9I/AAAAAAAAA3M/lJhyoFitwPo/s400/color_candies%2Bscaled2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5568562656566311890" /></a>One of my favorite of Mueller's examples is:<blockquote><a href="http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arc99/1_9_99/food.htm">Eat sweets, live longer</a>.</blockquote>All you have to do is juxtapose "eat sweets" and "live longer". Your mind does the rest.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2011/01/causal-language.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-5875414829735773324Wed, 12 Jan 2011 03:28:00 +00002011-01-11T23:43:16.921-05:00cancercausalityinevitabilityrandomnesssmokingChance and inevitabilityIn an <a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-shermer-arizona-shooting-20110111,0,3409038.story">op-ed</a> in today's issue of the Los Angeles Times, Michael Shermer wrote about the rush "to find the deep underlying causes of shocking events", with reference to the shooting in Tucson, Arizona and the recent mass bird deaths. <br /><br />Shermer made some good points, but parts of his argument were flawed. For example, he cited statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health to argue that unbalanced people are not uncommon, and <blockquote><i>Given these statistics, events such as the shooting in Tucson are bound to happen, no matter how nicely politicians talk to one another on the campaign trail or in Congress, no matter how extreme tea party slogans are about killing government programs, and no matter how stiff or loose gun control laws are in this or that state. By chance — and nothing more — there will always be people who do the unthinkable.</i></blockquote>In other words, he is pointing out what he sees as an inevitability, and then attributing it to chance. But an inevitability is the opposite of chance: it is a systematic pattern. And a systematic pattern is precisely what we <i>can</i> hope to change. I tend to agree with Shermer that "there will always be people who do the unthinkable." But surely we ought to do what we can to make such occurrences as rare as possible, and to reduce the harms as much as we can.<br /><br />Shermer finishes his piece as follows:<blockquote><i>... as often as not, events in life turn on chance, randomness and statistical probabilities that are largely beyond our control. So calls for "an end to all overt and implied appeals to violence in American politics" — such as that just issued by MoveOn.org — may make us feel better, but they will do nothing to alter the inevitability of such one-off events in the future.</i></blockquote>By definition "one-off events" are unpredictable and idiosyncratic. And yet Shermer says they are inevitable. The apparent confusion here is between statistical probabilities that can be used to make fairly certain predictions, and the virtual impossibility of prediction at the micro level. For example, age- and sex-specific incidence rates of different types of cancer are carefully tabulated by the <a href="http://wonder.cdc.gov/cancer.HTML">CDC</a>, and we can use these rates to predict the number of people who will be diagnosed with cancer this year. But we can't predict well <i>who</i> those people will be. There are, however, patterns. We learned that smoking causes lung cancer (and heart disease, and emphysema, ....) and through reduced smoking rates we have seen <a href="http://www.tri.ie/media/1249/CACO%20paper.pdf">reductions in mortality [pdf]</a>. Perhaps we do have some control after all.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2011/01/chance-and-inevitability.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-3405402595844448485Sat, 11 Dec 2010 13:26:00 +00002010-12-18T17:00:57.995-05:00mapsmodelsoversimplificationsimplificationOversimplification<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQOEPnRTUSI/AAAAAAAAA0o/BRqU81ReOlg/s1600/crude%2Bworld%2Bmap%2B-%2Btexture2.png"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 218px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQOEPnRTUSI/AAAAAAAAA0o/BRqU81ReOlg/s400/crude%2Bworld%2Bmap%2B-%2Btexture2.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549424569625039138" border="0" /></a>The map of the world is a familiar image. But a closer look at this one reveals that it is lacking detail. For example, a number of large islands are absent, including the British Isles, Japan, and the island where I grew up, Newfoundland. The continent of Antarctica has been omitted. Furthermore, Greenland and Ellesmere Island are joined, while North and South America are disconnected. Still, the map does give a general idea of the shape of the continents (except of course Antarctica). And it's certainly better than I could draw! The map is a simplification. But is it an oversimplification?<br /><br />Here I want to take a general look at oversimplification because it has broad relevance and raises some subtle questions. Maps provide a convenient example and raise some issues that turn up elsewhere. In particular, I'm going to focus on how oversimplified ideas gain traction in our society, as illustrated by three popular nonfiction books.<br /><br />Although the world map above simplifies a number of details, it is important to note that any map at a given scale involves simplification. Fine detail is sacrificed for an overall description. What's more, regardless of the projection used, any two-dimensional world map inevitably provides a distorted representation of our planet. A map is a model, and as I argued <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2006/05/trouble-with-models.html">previously</a>, one should not confuse models with reality, or in the words of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation">Alfred Korzybski</a>, "the map is not the territory." It is however convenient to represent the world in two dimensions with various details simplified. This is a general aspect of simplification: for all its costs, it is convenient.<br /><br />Nevertheless, we do have the word "oversimplification", suggesting that you can have too much of a good thing. But if that is true, where would you draw the line? How much simplification is too much simplification? This issue arises, for example, in science teaching. If you were to teach 10-year-old children about Einstein's theory of special relativity, some simplification would be necessary. If you were teaching 16-year-old children, simplification would also be necessary, but to a slightly lesser degree. Einstein himself recognized the challenge of simplification, and is often quoted as having said that "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler," which has been dubbed "Einstein's razor" in reference to <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2007/10/its-complicated.html">Occam's Razor</a>. Certainly, it would be oversimplification if one taught a university student the same way as a 10-year-old (or "undersimplification" if it were the other way around, though nobody uses the term).<br /><br />But "oversimplification" is often used in a slightly different sense, one that hints at distortion, deception, or dishonesty. The issue then may not be too much simplification, but rather that the simplification is carried out in a way that is somehow improper. The world map above may perhaps offer a hint of this. As I noted above, some substantial islands have been omitted from the map. But larger ones such as Madagascar are present. However, one enormous landmass is not present: Antarctica, despite the fact that it is larger in land area than Australia. A possible explanation is that Antarctica is seen as unimportant because nobody lives there (except for a handful of scientists). This could be seen as a type of bias. It is one thing to simplify, but another to do so in such a way as to systematically misrepresent. I'm not really taking the map-maker to task here so much as using this as an illustration of a biased simplification.<br /><br />I believe there is another way in which simplification can be improper, and that is when there is a lack of transparency. A simplified portrayal should not be presented without some explanation of how it was obtained. This provides some protection from confusing a simplification with "the truth". For example, in the case of a world map, different projections can give strikingly different impressions of our planet. For example, compare the map at the beginning of this article with the Eisenlohr conformal projection below:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQTWXlEKj5I/AAAAAAAAA0w/SZS-oAsxv9w/s1600/eis-s80h.png"><img style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 400px; height: 257px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQTWXlEKj5I/AAAAAAAAA0w/SZS-oAsxv9w/s400/eis-s80h.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549796341402210194" border="0" /></a><br /><br /><b>Oversimplification in popular works of nonfiction</b><br /><br />To further explore oversimplification, I'd like to consider three recent works of nonfiction. My purpose here is not to provide detailed reviews or commentary, nor to pass any overall judgment, but rather to explore issues of oversimplification that have been raised by others.<br /><br /><b>The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values</b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQVqCOkoXtI/AAAAAAAAA04/h3Z8t-g0wVA/s1600/the%2Bmoral%2Blandscape%2Bcover.png"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 93px; height: 135px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQVqCOkoXtI/AAAAAAAAA04/h3Z8t-g0wVA/s400/the%2Bmoral%2Blandscape%2Bcover.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549958702308024018" border="0" /></a>Sam Harris' <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1439171211/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d4_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&amp;pf_rd_s=center-2&amp;pf_rd_r=0XVB524S00P9DJ9FWXJ9&amp;pf_rd_t=101&amp;pf_rd_p=470938631&amp;pf_rd_i=507846">The Moral Landscape</a> makes the claim that moral questions can be not only informed but <i>answered</i> by science. Sam Harris proposes an updated version of utilitarianism, whereby an action is only morally right if it contributes to "well-being". Versions of this idea have been around for a long time: some of the key contributions to utilitarianism were made in the 1800's, and numerous objections and counterarguments have been made since then. But as <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Appiah-t.html">Kwame Anthony Appiah</a> writes in the New York Times, "having acknowledged some of these complications, [Harris] is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path." As philosophy professor Troy Jollimore <a href="http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/t5/Reviews-Essays/The-Moral-Landscape/ba-p/3477">wrote</a>: <blockquote><i>Harris might be right that the best way to reach a "wider audience" is to sidestep difficult philosophical issues. But just how helpful to that wider audience can a book be that hides from the complexities of its subject, and misrepresents what it alleges to discuss by making genuinely difficult questions look straightforward and simple?</i></blockquote>As I noted earlier, misrepresented simplification is a key feature of oversimplification. Harris has also been <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/12/new-5-minute-philosopher-video-can.html#comments">criticized</a> for using an uncommonly broad definition of science and for placing it in an easily-missed footnote. The footnote reads:<blockquote><i>For the purposes of this discussion, I do not intend to make a hard distinction between “science” and other intellectual contexts in which we discuss “facts”—e.g., history. For instance, it is a fact that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Facts of this kind fall within the context of “science,” broadly construed as our best effort to form a rational account of empirical reality. Granted, one doesn’t generally think of events like assassinations as “scientific” facts, but the murder of President Kennedy is as fully corroborated a fact as can be found anywhere, and it would betray a profoundly unscientific frame of mind to deny that it occurred. I think “science,” therefore, should be considered a specialized branch of a larger effort to form true beliefs about events in our world.</i></blockquote>It does seem odd to put in a footnote an idiosyncratic definition of a word that appears in the book's subtitle and is central to Harris' case. Note that Harris' use of a generalized notion of science is a form of simplification. Failing to highlight this simplification could be seen as oversimplification.<br /><br /><b>The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference</b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQVrn4iLcJI/AAAAAAAAA1A/5dH2Natrp3c/s1600/the%2Btipping%2Bpoint%2Bcover.png"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 111px; height: 150px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQVrn4iLcJI/AAAAAAAAA1A/5dH2Natrp3c/s400/the%2Btipping%2Bpoint%2Bcover.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549960448738816146" border="0" /></a> Malcolm Gladwell's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tipping-Point-Little-Things-Difference/dp/0316346624/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1292165050&amp;sr=8-5">The Tipping Point</a> explores factors that may explain how social trends can suddenly catch on. In a review on Amazon.com, Benjamin Northrop wrote that Gladwell "seems to be showing you what's really behind the "curtain" - not something boring or muddled or technical, but rather something simple and crisp and clear!" He goes on to say that <blockquote><i>The problem, however, is that real life is not so simple, nor is real science. Complex phenomenon have complex causal components. ... Gladwell, however, disingenuously presents only the facts and the stories that prove his point, giving the reader the false impression that there really is no debate, he has found "the answer".</i></blockquote>Northrup's mention of "complex causal components" points to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_the_single_cause">causal oversimplification</a>. Many phenomena have multiple causes; reducing them to a single purported mechanism can make for a more compelling account, but may provide only a counterfeit understanding.<br /><br /><b>The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature</b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 86px; height: 135px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQVtjMCWfuI/AAAAAAAAA1Q/Pk10609mr-Q/s400/the%2Bblank%2Bslate%2Bcover.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5549962567097941730" border="0" /></a>Stephen Pinker's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1292167002&amp;sr=8-1">The Blank Slate</a> attacks the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate. In a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R1QLXHZ6YACWRB/ref=cm_srch_res_rtr_alt_10">review</a>, David B Richman suggests that Pinker has constructed a straw man:<blockquote><i>I agree with [Pinker] that a person's genetic makeup is highly important and that the extreme blank slate idea (that humans are born without a human nature and can be "written on" like a blank slate) is obviously wrong. ... However, I cannot follow the equally extreme idea that only our genes matter (a concept that Pinker alternately defends and retreats from.) As several people have pointed out in recent research the expression of a gene is primarily a dialog between genome and environment. Indeed, is there any reputable scientist today who believes in the absolute Blank Slate?</i></blockquote>A straw man is a kind of oversimplification: the wide range of views on a topic that are contrary to one's own are simplified down to a single, extreme one. If debate were really so polarized this might be acceptable, but this is rarely the case. And when countering an extreme opponent (albeit of one's own creation), one may find oneself presenting highly selective evidence, another hallmark of oversimplification. Another reviewer, D. Palmer, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/review/R2D44HIVULAWD6/ref=cm_srch_res_rtr_alt_2">writes</a>:<blockquote><i>Pinker presents other points of view only in caricature, apparently with the goal of persuading the reader, not informing him.</i></blockquote><br /><b>The sources of oversimplification</b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQy0wp6HQ_I/AAAAAAAAA1g/vTt0gZTZciI/s1600/slogans%2Boversimplify%2Bt-shirt%2Bsmaller.png"><img style="float: left; margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; cursor: pointer; width: 182px; height: 178px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TQy0wp6HQ_I/AAAAAAAAA1g/vTt0gZTZciI/s400/slogans%2Boversimplify%2Bt-shirt%2Bsmaller.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5552011188617298930" border="0" /></a>Oversimplified ideas abound. All three of the above books have made it to the New York Times Bestseller lists. Politicians routinely deal in oversimplification, and the voting public often seems only too happy to accept it. Stereotypes and sweeping generalizations are ever popular. Clearly there's something very appealing about oversimplification. But as I have argued above, it is possible, through transparency and efforts to avoid bias, to separate simplification—which is not only helpful but essential—from oversimplification.<br /><br />So why is oversimplification so prevalent? One reason may be that it takes much less intellectual effort to accept a simplification that is presented without a transparent explanation of how it was obtained. It is easier to point to a map and say "this is the Earth" than to say "this is a projection of the Earth onto two dimensions that exaggerates land areas near the poles". A map is most useful when we accept its metaphor, just as a play is most enjoyable when we suspend our disbelief. But to read a map intelligently you need to see the limits of the metaphor, just as a theater critic needs to be able to see the actors and not just the characters they play. This takes effort, and it is easier to simply be swept along without question.<br /><br /><b>Working overtime to overcome oversimplification</b><br /><br />The desire for simplicity seems to be universal. But we need not be taken in by oversimplification—whether it comes from our own thoughts or from the culture around us. We can start by distinguishing simplification from oversimplification. If there is a lack of transparency it's likely that oversimplification is at work.<br /><br />To prevent simplification from slipping into oversimplification, we can cultivate the discipline of switching perspectives. On the one hand, to realize the value of simplification we need to pretend that our model is "true", and work under this pretense. But on the other hand, we need to recognize the model for what it is, a convenient tool, but a construct, not reality. From this perspective we can see the limits of the model, and appreciate where it may lead us astray. Repeatedly switching perspectives, and integrating the resulting insights, is very hard work, but I believe it's essential if we want to avoid being imprisoned by our models.<br /><br />I will conclude with a quote from Goethe: "Everything is simpler than you think and at the same time more complex than you can imagine."http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2010/12/oversimplification.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-1689858844552597136Tue, 28 Sep 2010 02:34:00 +00002010-10-07T21:05:46.168-04:00consciousnessmindphysicalismSam HarrissciencescientismtechnologyWhen technology undermines science<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TKKeItaxRcI/AAAAAAAAAzI/_Ry2Qam-M2E/s1600/apple_ipad_2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 218px; height: 320px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TKKeItaxRcI/AAAAAAAAAzI/_Ry2Qam-M2E/s320/apple_ipad_2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5522149965577668034" /></a>On the day the iPad was launched, Apple sold <a href="http://www.tradingmarkets.com/news/press-release/gslo_ceilf_gslo-huge-ipad-sales-figures-prompted-new-deal-with-pree-corp--1142021.html">over 300,000</a> of the tablet computers. Since then, over 3 million iPads have been sold. Our society is infatuated with technology, and this affects us in ways both obvious and subtle. Here I want to examine how our adoration of technology influences the way we think about science, and in turn how we see our whole world. I should note that I write this as a scientist, and someone with a long-time interest in, and fascination with technology. <br /><br />Because the words science and technology are often paired, their meanings tend to be conflated. But science can be pursued with few technological spin-offs (as is the case with astrophysics, for example) and technology can be developed without the use of science (as was the case with the early technologies developed by trial and error in prehistory). Certainly scientific discoveries can often be used to develop new technologies, and existing technologies can be evaluated scientifically. But science itself is not about developing technology, it's about learning through systematic observation and (sometimes) experimental manipulation. Some would argue that this distinction is <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2006/05/defining-moment.html">mere semantics</a>, but I will argue that confusion between science and technology leads to some very unfortunate consequences.<br /><br />Because we're so taken with technology, and because of the close connection between science and technology, it's not surprising that science is held in high esteem. But this is a double-edged sword. The downsides of technology (e.g. sedentary behaviour patterns and burgeoning rates of obesity, global warming from carbon emissions, toxic waste, etc.) are sometimes blamed on science. On the one hand, this is fitting: for better or worse, without science, modern technologies could never have been developed. On the other hand, surely it is our society's moral, economic, and political choices that determine how scientific knowledge is applied, and responsibility for those choices should fall to the decision makers. But our terminological confusion blurs such distinctions, and science and technology are routinely seen as one and the same. Praise or criticism of one is seen as identical to praise or criticism of the other. This has lead to a curious polarization of views.<br /><br /><b>The church of science</b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TKnXlWPHVgI/AAAAAAAAAzQ/mn1CJ2wV4o0/s1600/science_fiction_9.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TKnXlWPHVgI/AAAAAAAAAzQ/mn1CJ2wV4o0/s320/science_fiction_9.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524183454570731010" /></a>On the one hand, a triumphalism of science has become more and more common. Science is increasingly seen as providing the most trustworthy information, or perhaps the <i>only</i> reliable source of knowledge, not just about the physical world, but about all aspects of life. <br /><br />I believe two factors underlie this tendency. First, the products of technological wizardry provide a concrete demonstration of the mastery and control that scientific knowledge can provide. The most important point here is the universality of this demonstration: no special knowledge or education is required to appreciate the power of technology. This technological factor rides on top of an epistemological claim. As <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=10096">Luke Muehlhauser</a> puts it:<blockquote><i>the massive success of science leads me to suspect that methods condoned [sic] by science are the most successful methods of knowing we have discovered yet.</i></blockquote>And while it seems likely that a philosophical argument such as this will only appeal to a limited audience, it nevertheless provides the intellectual muscle beneath the alluring skin of technology. <br /><br />Triumphalism about science has a long historical lineage, expressed in the first half of the 20th century in the school of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism">logical positivism</a>, and more recently in some of the writings of the so-called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Atheism">new atheists</a>. In their extreme forms, such arguments tend towards <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism">scientism</a>, the view that only scientific statements have any meaning and that, ultimately, science will provide all the answers. The trouble is, if science is seen as having all the answers, it must either expand to encompass a much broader range of concerns, or else dismiss such concerns as meaningless. Where does that leave ethics, philosophy, literature, history, art? While science can <i>inform</i> each of these fields, a radical redefinition of science would be required to assimilate them. And yet that is just what is being proposed.<br /><br /><b>Philosophy.</b> <a href="http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=10096">Luke Muehlhauser</a> argues: "I think philosophy will be most productive when it functions as an extension of successful science ... ". Commenting on such thinking, <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2009/11/on-difference-between-science-and.html">Massimo Pigliucci</a> writes: <blockquote><i>There are profound differences in method, style and type of problems between science and philosophy, and frankly I think that people who deny or minimize this simply have not taken their time to read any philosophy, or they would immediately see how bizarre it is to deny the difference.<br /><br />More broadly, I am having a really hard time understanding the agenda of people here who wish at all costs to dismiss philosophy or absorb it into science. Why are you so bent on arrogating more epistemological power to science than it possesses? Why is it not good enough to say that science is by far the best approach we have devised to understand the natural world, but that there are problems that lie outside of it and other disciplines that are better equipped to address those problems?</i></blockquote><br /><b>Ethics.</b> Sam Harris recently gave a <a href="http://www.ted.com/talks/sam_harris_science_can_show_what_s_right.html">TED talk</a> titled “Science can answer moral questions”, in which he argues that "The separation between science and human values is an illusion". <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/04/about-sam-harris-claim-that-science-can.html">Massimo Pigliucci</a> described the "malady that strikes Harris: scientism, the idea that science can do everything and provides us with all the answers that are worth having." <a href="http://thinkmonkey.livejournal.com/">Thinkmonkey</a>, a commenter on Pigliucci's blog wrote:<br /><blockquote><i>Sam Harris has simply not done the hard work needed to understand the historical and ongoing arguments in ethical theory and metaethics - the context in which the argument he wishes to make *must* be situated. Perhaps these arguments have not settled very much, but they have at least established some shared terminology and made important distinctions: Without knowing the terminology and understanding the important distinctions (and the reasons for them), Harris cannot help but be confused - and to introduce still more confusion when he attempts to engage with his critics.<br /><br />Philosophy may be where all the unanswered questions live, and may not get a lot of respect thereby, but at least we try to avoid these kinds of messes. Or, as Sydney Morgenbesser famously described our collective work: "You make a few distinctions. You clarify a few concepts. It’s a living."</i></blockquote> <br /><b>The Humanities.</b> The academic disciplines concerned with the human condition include history, literature, law, languages, art, and religious studies. Aspects of these and related fields may be studied using the methods of social science. But large parts of these disciplines use methods that are not scientific. Criticism of these disciplines is increasingly common. For example, the website of <a href="http://www.edge.org/about_edge.html">Edge: The Third Culture</a> sneers:<blockquote><i>The third culture consists of those scientists and other thinkers in the empirical world who, through their work and expository writing, are taking the place of the traditional intellectual in rendering visible the deeper meanings of our lives, redefining who and what we are. <br /><br />... the traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time. Their culture, which dismisses science, is often nonempirical. It uses its own jargon and washes its own laundry. It is chiefly characterized by comment on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.</i></blockquote><br /><b>Mathematics.</b> Interestingly, the claim that science provides the only reliable source of knowledge is easily refuted. Mathematics uses deduction to arrive at certain knowledge, something that science cannot achieve. One response to this is to claim that mathematics is part of science. Certainly mathematics is a key <i>tool</i> of science, but claiming that it is <i>part</i> of science goes too far. A different response is to point out that mathematical knowledge pertains to abstract entities, and thus in itself is not practical. This is indeed correct, but it highlights the key point that there are different kinds of knowledge, which cannot be seen as competing, because they belong to entirely different spheres. <br /><br />Science is sometimes identified <i>tout court</i> with rationalism, and in a you're-either-with-us-or-against-us manoeuvre, everything else is simply deemed to be irrationalism. This is more a rhetorical trick than a line of reasoning, but once again we see the definition of science being expanded at will. <br /><br /><b>Science as fiction</b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TKnrmuoQTrI/AAAAAAAAAzY/8NuWUbeOvA8/s1600/Homeopathy-Drawers-contai-001.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 192px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TKnrmuoQTrI/AAAAAAAAAzY/8NuWUbeOvA8/s320/Homeopathy-Drawers-contai-001.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524205468531052210" /></a>At the other extreme, is an anti-science sentiment that manifests itself in support for pseudoscience, quackery, and superstition. From Deepak Chopra to crystals to the anti-vaccination movement, anti-science thinking is surprisingly prevalent. As I suggested previously, some of this is a reaction against the evident problems engendered by technology, coupled with a confusion between science and technology. But some of the anti-science thinking is a reaction to the kind of triumphalism of science that I have described. <br /><br /><b>What is to be done?</b><br /><br />I've argued that fuzzy definitions have done real damage, fueling a grandiose vision of science and its flip side, a crude resurgence of superstition and anti-science thinking. The pairing of science and technology is here to stay, and the allure of technology will continue to promote an exaggerated conception of science. What can be done in the face of this tendency?<br /><br />First, it remains important to distinguish between science and technology. The careless fusing of the two terms contributes to the unwarranted expansion of the notion of science. Second, it is important to challenge attempts to expand the purview of science to non-empirical matters such as ethics. This does no good to either science or ethics. While science can certainly inform ethics, the primary focus of ethics is <i>normative</i>, not predictive or explanatory. Science provides the best way to understand the physical world, but it is not a source of values or meaning. Third, pseudo-science, superstition, and quackery should be challenged by insisting on high-quality evidence. However it should be remembered that such delusions are nourished by out-sized claims about the universal dominion of science. Attempts to discredit new-age nonsense can backfire when metaphysical claims are denounced as being unscientific. Science can only address empirical claims. Non-empirical claims may certainly be challenged, but not by science.<br /><br /><b>Mind your own business</b> <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TKqQYDRoyvI/AAAAAAAAAzo/JZuqas44tXo/s1600/brain-biology-medical-research-biology-01-af.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 247px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TKqQYDRoyvI/AAAAAAAAAzo/JZuqas44tXo/s320/brain-biology-medical-research-biology-01-af.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5524386635793877746" /></a>Many of the issues I have discussed are particularly vexing where the mind is concerned. Advances in neuroscience have encouraged a <a href="http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/physicalism/">physicalist</a> view that in its most extreme form argues that the mind is nothing more than the activity of neurons. This idea has an interesting connection with technology. Early computers were described as being "like a brain". As computers became more familiar, the simile was inverted, and the brain was seen as being "like a computer". More recently this process has reached its conclusion, and it is common to hear that the brain simply "is a computer". <br /><br />Of course it's true that the brain computes, albeit in a way rather different from our digital computers. But somehow, along with the computation, we <i>experience</i> consciousness, a sense of self, the impression of free will. We experience sensation (rather than simply processing signals), we feel emotion, we delight in beauty and we abhor ugliness. Questions about these aspects of mind have occupied philosophers from the earliest times. Naturally, developments in the scientific understanding of the brain have had an important impact on philosophy of mind. But the fundamental questions remain.<br /><br />Unfortunately, reductionist views about the mind are flourishing, nourished by both enthusiasm about developments in neuroscience and uncritical acceptance of the technological metaphor that "the brain is a computer". It is perhaps noteworthy that Sam Harris, who argues in his new book that <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moral-Landscape-Science-Determine-Values/dp/1439171211">Science Can Determine Human Values</a>, has a PhD in neuroscience. In a New York Times review of Harris's book (with the telling title <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/books/review/Appiah-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=books">Science Knows Best</a>), Kwame Anthony Appiah writes:<blockquote><i>when he stays closest to neuroscience, he says much that is interesting and important ... Yet such science is best appreciated with a sense of what we can and cannot expect from it ...</i></blockquote>Indeed we should approach all science this way.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2010/09/when-technology-undermines-science.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-6606120188809235374Fri, 03 Sep 2010 17:19:00 +00002010-09-03T13:24:55.882-04:00FlashRainbow particlesMy son enjoys creating Flash applications. Check this one out:<br /><br /><embed src="http://sites.google.com/site/logbase2org/Home/s5bS.swf?attredirects=0" style="WIDTH: 465px; HEIGHT: 465px"></embed>http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2010/09/rainbow-particles.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-8794937819237800109Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:43:00 +00002010-11-06T11:51:28.329-04:00missing valuesRSPSSstatisticsAn ORnery problem<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/THRBMNxbg6I/AAAAAAAAAyQ/9X41RsksDFw/s1600/missing-piece.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 150px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/THRBMNxbg6I/AAAAAAAAAyQ/9X41RsksDFw/s200/missing-piece.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5509099922292179874" /></a>Some time ago, I wrote about <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2006/06/another-kind-of-nothing.html">missing values</a> and how they complicate the life of an applied statistician. A particularly tricky case concerns <em>logical variables</em>, and I give a more detailed explanation here.<br /><br />Suppose <i>X</i> is a variable representing whether a person is at risk for developing <a href="http://diabetes.niddk.nih.gov/dm/pubs/riskfortype2/">type-2 diabetes</a>. Two known risk factors are (<i>A</i>) being older and (<i>B</i>) being overweight. If we had a database containing the age and weight of each person in a group, we could compute <i>X</i> using the following <i>logical expression</i>:<br /><blockquote><center><i>X</i> = <i>A</i> OR <i>B</i>.</center></blockquote>(<i>X</i>, <i>A</i>, and <i>B</i> are known as logical variables, and they each take values TRUE or FALSE according to whether the corresponding condition holds.) But what happens if some ages and weights are missing from the database? Fortunately statistical software packages like R and SPSS have built-in rules that will correctly evaluate the logical expression, even if <i>A</i> or <i>B</i> (or both) are missing. The complete <em>truth table</em> is as follows (where T means TRUE, F means FALSE, and a dot means missing):<br /><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/THUddiIAMgI/AAAAAAAAAyg/k3SxsUH_qMU/s1600/truthtable+version3.PNG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 292px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/THUddiIAMgI/AAAAAAAAAyg/k3SxsUH_qMU/s320/truthtable+version3.PNG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5509342112371454466" /></a><br />Note that if <i>A</i> is FALSE and <i>B</i> is missing, the result is missing. That makes sense because if the actual value of <i>B</i> were TRUE, the result would be TRUE, but if the actual value of <i>B</i> were FALSE, the result would be FALSE. Thus it is not possible to say what the value of <i>X</i> is.<br /><br />The trouble is, this logic can sometimes be perverse. Suppose <i>X</i> instead represents whether a patient tests positive for infection with a certain virus. But there may be two different blood tests (<i>A</i> and <i>B</i>), and patients may receive one or the other, or perhaps both. Suppose that if any of the tests is positive, the patient will be considered to be infected. The logical variables <i>A</i> and <i>B</i> take the values TRUE, FALSE, or missing according to whether the corresponding tests were positive, negative, or simply not performed. Shouldn't the logical expression <i>X</i> = <i>A</i> OR <i>B</i> handle this situation correctly? Unfortunately not. Suppose only one test was performed, and it was negative. Then the truth table shows that <i>X</i> will be missing, even though the patient tested negative!<br /><br />Why does the logical expression handle missing values the way we want in the first case, but fail to do so in the second? The answer is that in the first case a missing value represents the fact that the age or weight of a given person is <em>not available</em>, whereas in the second case, when a test outcome is missing from the database, it means that <i>no test was performed</i>, thus the variable representing the outcome is <em>not applicable</em>. Another common case of variables that are not applicable occurs with data representing observations on multiple occasions. For example, suppose a database records whether hotel guests eat at the hotel restaurant on the first day of their stay (EAT1), the second day (EAT2), or the third day (EAT3). Some guests stay for just one day, while others stay longer. The database may look like this:<br /><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/THUg12zSG5I/AAAAAAAAAyw/n_og0xT20hY/s1600/guest+table+version+3.PNG"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 138px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/THUg12zSG5I/AAAAAAAAAyw/n_og0xT20hY/s320/guest+table+version+3.PNG" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5509345828773436306" /></a><br />This is an example of a <em>ragged array</em>, and as with the blood test, the issue is that the denominator (the number of tests performed, or the number of days a guest stays at the hotel) varies. To determine whether a guest ate at the hotel restaurant at least once (which we will represent by the logical variable EAT), we might try:<blockquote><center>EAT = EAT1 OR EAT2 OR EAT3.</center></blockquote>Unfortunately, as with the blood test example, this can fail when there are missing values. Guest number 4 in the table above stayed just one day at the hotel and did not eat at the restaurant, so EAT should be FALSE, but the expression above gives a missing value.<br /><br /><b>Workaround in R</b><br /><br />In R, the vertical bar operator | represents OR, and missing values are represented by NA. For the diabetes example, the following behaviour is just what we want:<br /><code style="font-size: 11pt"><br />> FALSE | NA<br />[1] NA<br /></code><br />In other words, when a person does not have one of the risk factors, but we don't know about the other one, then we don't know if the person is at risk. But for the blood test example, we need to use the following code:<br /><code style="font-size: 11pt"><br />> sum(FALSE,NA,na.rm=TRUE)>0<br />[1] FALSE<br /></code><br />The <tt style="font-size: 11pt">sum</tt> function adds up logical values by treating TRUE as 1 and FALSE as zero. If the sum of the logical values is greater than zero, then at least one of the values must have been TRUE. Setting <tt style="font-size: 11pt">na.rm=TRUE</tt> tells <tt style="font-size: 11pt">sum</tt> to ignore missing values.<br /><br /><b>Workaround in SPSS</b><br /><br />The situation is much the same in SPSS. For the diabetes example, the following works: <br /><code style="font-size: 11pt"><br />COMPUTE X = A OR B.<br />EXECUTE.<br /></code><br />But for the blood test example, we need to use:<br /><code style="font-size: 11pt"><br />COMPUTE X = SUM(A,B)>0.<br />EXECUTE.<br /></code><br />Note that the SPSS function <tt style="font-size: 11pt">SUM</tt> ignores missing values.<br /><br /><b>Missing value mistakes</b><br /><br />The hard part, of course, is thinking through how the missing values in a given situation should be handled. I suspect that this issue has resulted in countless errors in data analyses. Proceed with caution: a miss is as good as a mile!http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2010/08/ornery-problem.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-4605776633218539063Sat, 26 Jun 2010 13:16:00 +00002010-06-27T22:54:27.915-04:00The prince and the polemicist<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TCfBkhcFfqI/AAAAAAAAAxg/FTe89cd8MWQ/s1600/prince+charles+christopher+hitchesn.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 129px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/TCfBkhcFfqI/AAAAAAAAAxg/FTe89cd8MWQ/s320/prince+charles+christopher+hitchesn.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5487567504169860770" /></a>I've written <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2006/06/of-buffoonery-and-bigotry.html">before</a> about Christopher Hitchens and his penchant for overblown rhetoric. Well, he's at it again, this time with a <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2256915/">scathing attack</a> on none other than Prince Charles. As a longtime advocate of the dismantling of the monarchy, you might think this would be music to my ears. Well, it's not. Hitchens' diatribe is mean-spirited and intellectually flawed.<br /><br />The mean-spirited aspects are easily catalogued and of lesser significance. Hitchens calls Prince Charles "a very silly man", "a moral and intellectual weakling", "a morose bat-eared and chinless man, prematurely aged, and with the most abysmal taste in royal consorts" whose "empty sails are so rigged as to be swelled by any passing waft or breeze of crankiness and cant". <br /><br />What is of more interest to me than all this name calling is the substance of Hitchens' piece, which concerns a <a href="http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speechesandarticles/a_speech_by_hrh_the_prince_of_wales_titled_islam_and_the_env_252516346.html">speech</a> the prince gave recently at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. It turns out that Prince Charles is the patron of the Centre, and in his speech he said:<br /><blockquote><i>It has been a great concern of mine to affirm and encourage those groups and faith communities that are in the minority in this country. Indeed, over the last twenty-five years, I have tried to find as many ways as possible to help integrate them into British society and to build good relationships between our faith communities. I happen to believe this is best achieved by emphasizing unity through diversity. Only in this way can we ensure fairness and build mutual respect in our country. And if we get it right here then perhaps we might be able to offer an example in the wider world.</i></blockquote>Hitchens contemptuously labels this as "Islamophilia" and writes:<br /><blockquote><i>... as he paged his way through his dreary wad of babble, there must have been some wolfish smiles among his Muslim audience.</i></blockquote>This kind of innuendo is typical: here and in his other writings, Hitchens often hints at Muslim fanaticism. In this case, at least, it seems to be entirely the product of his imagination.<br /><br />Prince Charles' speech was titled "Islam and the Environment". He pointed out that "Many of Nature's vital, life-support systems are now struggling to cope under the strain of global industrialization", and went on to argue that: <br /><blockquote><i>... what is less obvious is the attitude and general outlook which perpetuate this dangerously destructive approach. It is an approach that acts contrary to the teachings of each and every one of the world's sacred traditions, including Islam.</i></blockquote>Prince Charles explained that he was referring to "a mechanistic and reductionist approach to our scientific understanding of the world around us." It is perhaps not surprising that Hitchens, one of the "new atheists" and author of <span style="font-style:italic;">Good is Not Great</span>, characterizes this as a claim that "the scientific worldview" is "an affront to all the world's "sacred traditions." But this misconstrues what the prince was saying. Later on in his speech, Prince Charles argued that: <br /><blockquote><i>... there is a point beyond which empiricism cannot make complete sense of the world. It works by establishing facts through testing them by the scientific process. It is one kind of language and a very fine one, but it is a language not able to fathom experiences like faith or the meaning of things – it is not able to articulate matters of the soul.</i></blockquote>Hitchens dismisses this as "vapid talk about the 'soul' of the universe". But although the prince made liberal use of words like "soul", "spiritual", and "faith", his arguments do not stand or fall on a narrow religious interpretation. He was pointing out that science has limits, and the temptation to pretend otherwise may lead us astray. Prince Charles sees part of the solution in "the traditional teachings, like those found in Islam that define our relationship with the natural world". Not everyone will share his interpretation, but it's hardly the "farrago of nonsense" that Hitchens alleges.<br /><br />I found the prince's speech interesting and even thought-provoking. <a href="http://www.princeofwales.gov.uk/speechesandarticles/a_speech_by_hrh_the_prince_of_wales_titled_islam_and_the_env_252516346.html">Read it yourself</a> and see what you think.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2010/06/prince-and-polemicist.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-7399736918720719714Sun, 31 Jan 2010 14:02:00 +00002010-02-19T10:41:11.355-05:00JustPacifism<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://justpacifism.com"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 195px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/S2WOJbFT0-I/AAAAAAAAAxA/jM0qZ04pNT8/s400/justpacifism.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432904818032366562" /></a>I just launched a new blog devoted entirely to pacifism, defined as a commitment to peace and opposition to violence and war. It's called <a href="http://JustPacifism.com">JustPacifism.com</a> and it's meant to be a place to discuss pacifism from the broadest standpoint, without focusing on any single tradition or framework. Here's part of my introductory post:<br /><br />I see pacifism as a <em>direction</em> of thought and action rather than a fixed point, as I have illustrated below:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/S2WOwS6owFI/AAAAAAAAAxI/Y56_m9DF5jo/s1600-h/continuum2.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 70px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/S2WOwS6owFI/AAAAAAAAAxI/Y56_m9DF5jo/s400/continuum2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5432905485855014994" /></a>At the far right-hand side is what some have termed "absolute pacifism". In its strongest form such a commitment would prohibit violence even in self defense, and perhaps violence against non-human living things. At the other extreme is a total lack of concern about violence. Someone holding this view might oppose a given war, <i>but not because it involves violence</i>. For example such a person might object that this particular war is not cost effective.<br /><br />I suspect that not many people hold to one of the views at either end of my diagram. Instead, most of us fall somewhere in between. If it were possible to formulate a "pacifism index", then someone with no concern at all about the use of violence would score a 0%, and an absolute pacifist would score a 100%. I would be interested in where readers would place themselves (or perhaps historical figures) on such a scale. Of course it's just a thought experiment, but it demonstrates how pacifism is not a fixed point, but a tendency. To the extent that you believe that your society is too ready to use violence, I would say that you have pacifist leanings.<br /><br />What I find particularly striking however, is that discussions of pacifism so often gravitate towards debating the absolute pacifist position. Although I recognize the philosophical value in considering the boundaries of an issue, I think that one must not ignore the domain where most choices are actually faced. One shouldn't spend too much time worrying about scaling Mount Everest if one has trouble climbing a couple of flights of stairs. And yet pacifism is routinely dismissed based on this sort of reasoning!<br /><br />I'd like to invite folks to visit <a href="http://JustPacifism.com">JustPacifism.com</a>, and join the discussion!http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2010/01/justpacifism.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-8707478994922732738Sun, 17 Jan 2010 02:53:00 +00002010-01-18T12:21:46.749-05:00Barack ObamaMartin Luther King Jr.peacewarMartin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/S1KZle5c3uI/AAAAAAAAAw4/OcHAYtvpg7w/s1600-h/mlkobama.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 274px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/S1KZle5c3uI/AAAAAAAAAw4/OcHAYtvpg7w/s400/mlkobama.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5427569370163109602" /></a><br />The links between Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama are hard to miss. Obama's historic election as the first African American President of the United States seemed to echo the stirring words of King's 1963 speech at the Lincoln Memorial:<blockquote><i>I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."</i></blockquote>Obama's inauguration took place on Tuesday, January 20th 2009, the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This Monday&mdash;one year later&mdash;Martin Luther King Jr. Day will again be celebrated, and with the one-year mark of Obama's presidency imminent, connections between the two men will again be drawn&mdash;including the fact that both were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But an examination of Obama's December-10th <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/10/obama-nobel-peace-prize-a_n_386837.html">acceptance speech</a> suggests some striking differences.<br /><br />The Nobel committee's selection of Obama so early in his presidency was controversial. Fuel was added to the fire when, just nine days before accepting the prize, he announced that he was sending 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. His acceptance speech was unapologetic:<blockquote><i>We must begin by acknowledging the hard truth: We will not eradicate violent conflict in our lifetimes. There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified.</i></blockquote>Yet he went on to say:<blockquote><i>I make this statement mindful of what Martin Luther King Jr. said in this same ceremony years ago: "Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones." As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King's life work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there's nothing weak -- nothing passive -- nothing naïve -- in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.</i></blockquote>Can you feel a "but" coming?<blockquote><i>But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone. I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people.</i></blockquote>So there it is. King and Gandhi had great "moral force", but, <i>apparently unlike them</i>, Obama faces "the world as it is". This strikes me as a shocking distortion: King and Gandhi were deeply involved in practical action, and indeed were instrumental in bringing about change.<br /><br />The rhetorical pattern we see here is repeated throughout Obama's speech. Moral principles are praised (as long as they remain principles), but "hard truth" is emphasized. Carefully crafted oratory is used to sell the Orwellian idea that "War is Peace". But the awkward fact remains that Martin Luther King Jr. was a proponent of non-violence. What does Obama make of that?<blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/S1KTyHFyxCI/AAAAAAAAAvo/bQrRhxTCmkQ/s1600-h/north+star.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 180px; height: 161px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/S1KTyHFyxCI/AAAAAAAAAvo/bQrRhxTCmkQ/s200/north+star.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5427562990040957986" /></a><i>The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached -- their fundamental faith in human progress -- that must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.</i></blockquote>It would appear that non-violence can be dispensed with when required. What is apparently fundamental is something rather vague and comforting: "love" and "faith in human progress". Of course Martin Luther King Jr. <i>did</i> talk above love, but as a basis for moral decisions rather than a distraction from them. <br /><br />King's 1964 Nobel Peace Prize <a href="http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/1964/king-acceptance.html">acceptance speech</a> is strikingly different from Obama's, as this excerpt suggests:<blockquote><i>After contemplation, I conclude that this award which I receive on behalf of [the civil rights movement] is a profound recognition that nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral question of our time - the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to violence and oppression. Civilization and violence are antithetical concepts. Negroes of the United States, following the people of India, have demonstrated that nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation. Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.</i></blockquote>Martin Luther King Jr.'s words apply to the <i>world as it is</i> in 2010, just as they did in 1964.<br /><br /><b>Update</b> (18-Jan-2010): Jeff Nall has written an excellent piece on "<a href="http://towardfreedom.com/home/content/view/1826/1/">How Obama Betrays Reverend King’s Philosophy of Nonviolence</a>".http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2010/01/martin-luther-king-jr-and-barack-obama.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)20tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-5231520421313938178Thu, 15 Oct 2009 23:46:00 +00002009-10-15T23:11:32.314-04:00A-B-C modelcausalityemotionthoughtYou are responsible for your feelings. Or are you?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/Ste0vKD1tKI/AAAAAAAAAu4/a4-yYOq2QUM/s1600-h/annoy+a+liberal.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 222px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/Ste0vKD1tKI/AAAAAAAAAu4/a4-yYOq2QUM/s320/annoy+a+liberal.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5392977801046766754" /></a>These days everyone seems to be in favour of people taking responsibility. But in the self-help world, an unusual spin on this idea has become popular: "You are responsible for your feelings." (Sometimes the word "emotions" is used instead of "feelings", and here I'll treat the two terms synonymously.) Now it makes sense to talk about taking responsibility for your behaviour&mdash;although it's easier said than done&mdash;but what would it mean for a person to take responsibility for their internal state of being? The question hinges on what we mean by the word "responsibility".<br /><br />Consider the following scenario: suppose you're helping to organize a party and you take responsibility for the drinks. In this case, taking responsibility means looking after, taking care of. Applying this to our feelings makes a good deal of sense. Ultimately, each of us needs to look after and take care of our feelings. Other people's behaviour can of course have a great impact on our lives, but each of us is the only one with direct access to our own feelings. Given this unique position, a passive approach doesn't make much sense. Part of what it means to "take responsibility for your feelings" is embodied in the familiar term from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: "the pursuit of happiness".<br /><br />But there's another sense to the word "responsibility". The sense of causation&mdash;and blame. For example, "Who's responsible for this mess?" and "The Taliban took responsibility for the attack." In what way can you be the cause of your feelings? Well, it turns out there's a very popular model in psychotherapy that suggests just that.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/StfCSGd9n4I/AAAAAAAAAvA/DnyFj1APZKg/s1600-h/abc+flow.gif"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 80px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/StfCSGd9n4I/AAAAAAAAAvA/DnyFj1APZKg/s400/abc+flow.gif" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5392992695029178242" /></a><br />It's called the A-B-C model and it was introduced by <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/25/nyregion/25ellis.html">Albert Ellis</a>, the founder of rational emotive behavioral therapy, a type of cognitive behavioral therapy. The A-B-C model counters the common notion that people and events <i>make</i> us feel certain ways. Ellis argued that between the activating event (A) and the emotional consequences (C) lie our beliefs (B). Changing our "irrational" beliefs can change how we feel about the events in our lives. While this approach seems reasonable&mdash;and indeed studies have shown that it can be very helpful for some people&mdash;the A-B-C model has its limitations. <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/StfGo6YtcRI/AAAAAAAAAvQ/Hl29uNpK_iM/s1600-h/scary-bear.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/StfGo6YtcRI/AAAAAAAAAvQ/Hl29uNpK_iM/s200/scary-bear.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5392997484969423122" /></a>For example suppose you're taking a pleasant walk in the woods when a bear jumps out at you. Your response may have little to do with your beliefs and a lot to do with thousands of years of evolution telling you that you're in mortal danger! Another limitation of the A-B-C model is that while thoughts can influence emotions, emotions can also influence thoughts. The work of neuroscientists such as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant%C3%B3nio_Dam%C3%A1sio">António Damásio</a> has revealed the intricacy of how thoughts and emotions are intertwined in the brain. The A-B-C model strikes me as a drastic oversimplification. And that's ok; it's <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2006/05/trouble-with-models.html">only a model</a> after all. An imperfect theory can still be useful. <br /><br />But the limitations of the A-B-C model often seem to be overlooked in pop psychology. If people's emotions are <i>caused</i> by their beliefs, then can't it be said that they "choose" their emotions? It's not hard to see how this can lead to "blaming the victim". For example, people who have suffered traumatic life events often experience serious emotional consequences. It would be callous in the extreme to suggest that their suffering is "caused" by their own beliefs.<br /><br />In the end, compassion is essential, both towards others and towards ourselves. I find it hard to see how simplistic notions of emotional causation will engender such a response.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/10/you-are-responsible-for-your-feelings.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-1654934967903110070Fri, 02 Oct 2009 23:23:00 +00002009-10-02T22:56:15.130-04:00emotionlogicStar TrekYou're being irrational!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SsaY9kQLL-I/AAAAAAAAAuo/LuPywdOGBlE/s1600-h/star-trek-spock1.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 289px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SsaY9kQLL-I/AAAAAAAAAuo/LuPywdOGBlE/s320/star-trek-spock1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388162187666337762" /></a>As anyone who has watched the original Star Trek series knows, Mr Spock was big on logic. He was also big on labeling the behaviour of humans "illogical". For example, consider this quote:<blockquote><i>May I say that I have not enjoyed serving under Humans. I find their illogic and foolish emotions a constant irritant.</i><br /><small>Season 3, episode 7 ("Day of the Dove")</small></blockquote>Now it's true that humans do make logical errors from time to time. For example suppose Tom is considering hiring a contractor. A friend recommends asking for references because "Good contractors provide references." Sure enough, the contractor provides references and Tom hires them. Unfortunately the work is poor, and Tom complains, "I thought good contractors provide references!?"<br /><br />But it's not just in the case of formal errors of logic that people's arguments and behaviour are termed "illogical"&mdash;or more commonly "irrational". For example, purchasing and selling decisions are sometimes called irrational simply because the commenter doesn't understand or agree with them. Why doesn't Grandma sell her home to make way for the skyscraper? She's been offered a very generous price! Why's she being <i>so irrational</i>? But Grandma has lived in that neighborhood for years and simply doesn't want a fancy new home with new neighbours.<br /><br />People whose political views differ from ours are often slurred as being irrational. But what we really mean is that <i>taken within our political framework</i> their arguments make no sense. What really doesn't make sense is the idea that someone else's argument has to fit with our premises.<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/Ssaj6lnhNXI/AAAAAAAAAuw/uHa9oItXDu0/s1600-h/logic.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 116px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/Ssaj6lnhNXI/AAAAAAAAAuw/uHa9oItXDu0/s320/logic.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5388174231120983410" /></a>Logic proceeds from premises to conclusions. Without the premises, there can be no reasoning. Premises can be facts ("It is raining.") but they can also be desires ("I'd like to stay dry."). When Mr Spock complains about human emotions, he's suggesting that we should behave like computers. But who will program the computers? <br /><br />Descartes' famous "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum">I think, therefore I am</a>" sounds a bit as if it privileges thinking above other human capacities. Descartes was in fact questioning everything he believed until he reached the point of questioning whether he himself existed. Of course this is nonsense: if he was thinking this, then he must exist. Problem solved! Sort of. What about everything else in the world, including his senses?<br /><br />Thinking is only part of what human existence entails. Feeling and emotions are perhaps more fundamental. And much of what purports to be reasoning may in fact be post hoc rationalizations. Simple exercises in reasoning&mdash;"It's raining and I'd like to stay dry, so I'll bring an umbrella"&mdash;depend on desires born of feelings (it's not pleasant to be cold and wet). When it comes to more complex motivations and behaviours, the roles of thinking and feeling get hopelessly entangled.<br /><br />Of course Mr Spock is just a character on a TV show. The writers repeatedly emphasize that emotion is indeed central to human existence. What bothers me is the false dichotomy they set up between thinking and feeling. In general, our emotions don't cause us to act irrationally, and the notion that we should act more "logically" misses the point. This is illustrated in Season 1, Episode 12 ("The Menagerie: Part II"):<blockquote>Captain Kirk: <i>Eh, Mr. Spock, when you're finished, please come back and see me, I want to talk to you. This regrettable tendency you've been showing lately towards flagrant emotionalism...</i><br /><br />Mr. Spock: <i>I see no reason to insult me, sir. I believe I've been completely logical about the whole affair.</i> </blockquote>http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/10/youre-being-irrational.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-8175386227528817728Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:07:00 +00002009-09-29T23:50:38.916-04:00causal inferenceecological fallacyepidemiologysciencestatisticsWhy do we overinterpret study findings?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SsK-yD778MI/AAAAAAAAAug/Topus8iOSjg/s1600-h/teenbirthratereligiosity.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 360px; height: 400px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SsK-yD778MI/AAAAAAAAAug/Topus8iOSjg/s400/teenbirthratereligiosity.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5387077871547969730" /></a>MSNBC <a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32884806/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/">recently reported</a> that a new study suggests "U.S. states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth". (I learned of this on <a href="http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2009/09/massimos-picks_27.html">Rationally Speaking</a>.) The study itself is Open Access, so all the details are <a href="http://www.reproductive-health-journal.com/content/6/1/14">freely available</a>. The scatterplot illustrates the strong association the authors found. Now, the authors were reasonably cautious in how they interpreted their findings. The trouble is, the general public may not be. <br /><br />A common error is to conclude the study shows that religiosity <i>causes</i> higher teen birth rates. But <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_causation">correlation does not imply causation</a>. It could be that higher teen birth rates cause religiosity. Or perhaps a third, unidentified factor causes both. <br /><br />But isn't the strength of association still impressive? It is. But what if, as I just suggested, there are other variables involved? Such <a href="http://clinicalevidence.blogspot.com/2008/08/confounding.html">confounding variables</a> (or confounders, as they are commonly known) can wreak havoc on this sort of analysis. Indeed, the authors of the study did adjust for median household income and abortion rate (both at the state level). But it is possible that other confounders are lurking. And unfortunately, we tend to forget entirely about the possibility of confounders when we hear about study findings.<br /><br />Another error is to conclude that the findings directly apply to individuals. Here I will quote the authors directly:<blockquote><i>We would like to emphasize that we are not attempting to use associations between teen birth rate and religiosity, using data aggregated at the state level, to make inferences at the individual level. It would be a statistical and logical error to infer from our results, “Religious teens get pregnant more often.” Such an inference would be an example of the ecological fallacy ... The associations we report could still be obtained if, hypothetically, religiosity in communities had an effect of discouraging contraceptive use in the whole community, including the nonreligious teens there, and only the nonreligious teens became pregnant. Or, to create a different imaginary scenario, the results could be obtained if religious parents discouraged contraceptive use in their children, but only nonreligious offspring of such religious parents got pregnant. We create these scenarios simply to illustrate that our ecological correlations do not permit statements about individuals.</i></blockquote><b>To err is human ...</b><br /><br />My goal here has not been to criticize the authors of this study, nor the media. Rather, what I find remarkable is how such a simple statement&mdash;"states whose residents have more conservative religious beliefs on average tend to have higher rates of teenagers giving birth"&mdash;can be so easily misinterpreted, and in so many different ways! Does anyone know of any research about our tendency to overinterpret scientific findings? Of course, we'd probably overinterpet it.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-do-we-overinterpret-study-findings.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-2887070280081836065Mon, 21 Sep 2009 01:42:00 +00002009-09-21T20:38:00.060-04:00AfghanistanBarack Obamahealth care reformIraqwarWar is bad for your health<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SrbtuGgFchI/AAAAAAAAAuY/YZquqG9bHC8/s1600-h/obama_hc_forum.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 213px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SrbtuGgFchI/AAAAAAAAAuY/YZquqG9bHC8/s320/obama_hc_forum.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383751780842959378" /></a>U.S. health care spending per capita is the highest in the world. Yet, as <a href="http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10521686">The Economist notes</a>, "America lags behind other wealthy countries in the overall performance of its medical system". It might seem ironic then, that the same magazine <a href="http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12321573">has stated</a> that the U.S. "offers the best health care in the world." But keep reading:<blockquote><i> If you are lucky enough to have proper insurance and be admitted to the Mayo Clinic, the UCLA Medical Centre or Johns Hopkins, you will enjoy outstanding treatment. Unfortunately, as the tens of millions of uninsured and underinsured have discovered, America offers some of the most unreliable, costliest and least equitable health care in the world too.</i></blockquote>The U.S. spends <a href="http://www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml">around 17%</a> of its GDP on health care. This compares to Canada where we have a publicly-funded system, and spend <a href="http://www.nchc.org/facts/world.shtml">around 9%</a>. <br /><br />Now there are lots of complexities here and I don't mean to oversimplify. The Canadian health care system is far from perfect, although I think most Canadians are bemused by the outlandish depictions some American demagogues present. In any case, the fact is health care costs have been spiralling here just like in the U.S. As President Obama struggles to enact health care reform, people wonder, "Where will we get the money?" Canadians are asking the same question.<br /><br /><b>Meanwhile, somewhere in Asia ...</b><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SrbtefKhO5I/AAAAAAAAAuQ/HvJeTUjUV7g/s1600-h/soldier-cp-w-5141713.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 180px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SrbtefKhO5I/AAAAAAAAAuQ/HvJeTUjUV7g/s320/soldier-cp-w-5141713.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5383751512585485202" /></a>... we have some nasty little wars going on. According to the <a href="http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/policy/securityspending/articles/gwot_spending_burn_rate/">Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation</a>, the U.S. spends $771 <i>a second</i> on Afghanistan and $3973 <i>a second</i> on Iraq. Oh, that's $2 billion/month and $10.3 billion/month respectively. Canada isn't involved in Iraq, but the <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/10/09/afghanistan-cost-report.html">total projected costs</a> of the Canadian involvement in Afghanistan are "up to" $18.1 billion. (Those quotes express a certain skepticism on my part.)<br /><br />And how <i>are</i> <a href="http://www.afghanistan.gc.ca/canada-afghanistan/documents/r06_09/index.aspx?lang=en">things going</a> in Afghanistan?<blockquote><i>Overall security conditions throughout much of Afghanistan continued to deteriorate during the quarter. In May and June, the frequency of insurgency attacks nationally was higher than in any month since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.</i></blockquote>The <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/afghanistan/casualties/list.html">CBC reports</a> that, to date,<blockquote><i>Since 2002, 131 Canadian soldiers have been killed serving in the Afghanistan mission. One diplomat and two aid workers have also been killed.</i></blockquote>There is no mention of Afghans. Nor&mdash;and this raises another point&mdash;is there any mention of soldiers who were wounded. Soldiers who may well require ongoing medical care. And how do you measure the costs of post-traumatic stress disorder?<br /><br /><b>Diagnosis</b><br /><br />We are pouring money down the drain on unnecessary, unwinnable wars, all the while wringing our hands about where we'll get the money to pay for decent health care.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/09/war-is-bad-for-your-health.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-3497093678226159273Sat, 05 Sep 2009 02:20:00 +00002009-09-04T23:53:21.523-04:00consciousnessphilosophyzombiesWhy philosophical zombies matter<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SqHK-xl_yHI/AAAAAAAAAtg/-ME8bVC9LgM/s1600-h/consciouscouple.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 369px; height: 400px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SqHK-xl_yHI/AAAAAAAAAtg/-ME8bVC9LgM/s400/consciouscouple.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5377802609870489714" /></a>I first wrote about the mysteries of consciousness on this blog back in <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2006/02/consciousness-or-im-way-out-of-my.html">February 2006</a>. This prompted me to do some reading on the philosophy of mind, and in <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2006/03/mind-matters-or-mind-boggling-mind.html">March 2006</a> I wrote more about consciousness. <br /><br />Though I didn't mention it directly in that post, a very compelling argument concerns what are called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie">philosophical zombies</a>. I would put the argument like this. First, ask yourself: Is it conceivable that there could be a thing that appears to be human but in fact has no conscious experience? In other words, a biological machine, identical to a human in every way, except that <em>it</em> has no free will, feels nothing, experiences nothing. To put it bluntly, a <em>zombie</em>.<br /><br />If your answer is no, then I would ask this: How can you know that some of the "humans" around you are not in fact zombies? Is there a device available that will measure consciousness? Granted we have tools that can measure aspects of the complex electrical and chemical activity in the brain. But complex electrical and chemical activity is not consciousness. Consciousness has to be <em>experienced</em>. And there's the rub. We can be sure of only one person's consciousness: our own. As Descartes famously noted, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cogito_ergo_sum">I think therefore I am</a>". Continuing to follow this line of reasoning can lead to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism">solipsism</a>, but that's not my point at all. Rather, I believe that the philosophical zombie argument provides one indication that there is more to the world than the material. <br /><br />In response to this argument, people will sometimes steadfastly maintain that consciousness is nothing more than complex neurological activity. When I point out that there's no reason to believe that such activity <em>has</em> to be accompanied by consciousness, the response has sometimes been to deny consciousness itself! Which brings me back to the cartoon at the start of this post. Someone who denies their own consciousness could only be a zombie!http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/09/why-philosophical-zombies-matter.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-7403992963853519846Sun, 30 Aug 2009 23:55:00 +00002009-08-30T20:11:26.095-04:00photographsPhotos from Gatineau Park<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SpsSBQXLn5I/AAAAAAAAAtY/UI-qOLFYeMg/s1600-h/orange.jpg"><img style="margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 259px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SpsSBQXLn5I/AAAAAAAAAtY/UI-qOLFYeMg/s400/orange.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375910392978186130" /></a><br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SpsR8J4wQiI/AAAAAAAAAtQ/YZT9PfyYhNw/s1600-h/crawl.jpg"><img style="margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 285px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SpsR8J4wQiI/AAAAAAAAAtQ/YZT9PfyYhNw/s400/crawl.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5375910305340604962" /></a><br /><br />Today was a wet day in the Ottawa area, but the Gatineau Park was beautiful, as always!http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/08/photos-from-gatineau-park.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-8090879258520403619Sun, 05 Jul 2009 02:23:00 +00002009-07-04T23:26:00.865-04:00biasjournalismThe headline effect<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SlAOuOcI32I/AAAAAAAAAtI/FTjddic_jWs/s1600-h/headline.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 370px; height: 226px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SlAOuOcI32I/AAAAAAAAAtI/FTjddic_jWs/s400/headline.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5354796144256409442" /></a>In Canadian print journalism, probably the single most important real estate is the front page of the Saturday Globe and Mail. Today's lead article was about the plight of Pakistani women fleeing the Swat valley. In the print issue, the headline was "Between Fear and Freedom", with a secondary headline stating that "The Taliban have driven almost a million women and children out of their homes in the Swat valley." The <a href="http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/pakistans-female-refugees-live-between-freedom-and-fear/article1206168/">article itself</a>, by Stephanie Nolen, describes it differently: "Nearly a million Pakistani women have had to flee ... as the government intensifies a military operation against Islamist militants."<br /><br />No doubt the agonizing decision to leave behind one's home is made for various reasons. Nolen writes: "The women arrive here with their families, running from Taliban aggression or aerial and ground attacks from the Pakistani military – or both." So why does the headline mention only the Taliban?<br /><br />In a journal article titled <a href="http://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1070&context=asc_papers">How Bias Shapes the News</a> [pdf], Barbie Zelizer and co-authors noted that "Headlines highlight the main point of the coverage, privileging certain interpretations of an event over others." The importance of headlines has been studied empirically. In a study by Percy Tannenbaum published in 1953 ("The Effects of Headlines on the Interpretation of News Stories", Journalism Quarterly, vol 30: 189-97), students were given a fictitious newspaper story about a homicide trial with different headlines. The slant of the headline was significantly associated with whether students believed the accused to be guilty or not. F. T. Marquez argued (The Journal of Communication, 1980, vol 30: 30-36.) that "Many newspaper readers may read only headlines and thus may form their opinions of the day’s events based on those headlines alone." <br /><br />As I understand it, newspaper headlines are typically not written by the journalists who write the articles. Jazzed-up headlines may serve to excite interest and sell more newspapers. But they may distort the content of the articles, and&mdash;whether consciously or unconsciously&mdash;inject ideological bias.http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/07/headline-effect.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-5232116876936727201Sun, 31 May 2009 13:11:00 +00002009-05-31T09:31:55.440-04:00photographsPhotos from BanffJust got back from a trip to Banff, Alberta. Foolishly, I didn't pack a camera! Well, except for my cell phone. So here, in glorious low resolution, are some snaps:<br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKEr0irC3I/AAAAAAAAAtA/1Z8O_Kt7Zt0/s1600-h/IMG00871.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKEr0irC3I/AAAAAAAAAtA/1Z8O_Kt7Zt0/s200/IMG00871.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5341977996388141938" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKEY-ubGSI/AAAAAAAAAs4/X894xBto2GU/s1600-h/IMG00881.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKEY-ubGSI/AAAAAAAAAs4/X894xBto2GU/s200/IMG00881.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5341977672704268578" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKEF2-U_PI/AAAAAAAAAsw/WWUmpZIyPDg/s1600-h/IMG00869.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKEF2-U_PI/AAAAAAAAAsw/WWUmpZIyPDg/s200/IMG00869.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5341977344205978866" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKCw8bAhKI/AAAAAAAAAso/FgCZrs3BLHY/s1600-h/IMG00879.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKCw8bAhKI/AAAAAAAAAso/FgCZrs3BLHY/s200/IMG00879.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5341975885379568802" /></a><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKCm79WQzI/AAAAAAAAAsg/lDH649-ElYI/s1600-h/IMG00877.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKCm79WQzI/AAAAAAAAAsg/lDH649-ElYI/s200/IMG00877.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5341975713456472882" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKCfoRO6OI/AAAAAAAAAsY/DsTBofXpdvU/s1600-h/IMG00876.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKCfoRO6OI/AAAAAAAAAsY/DsTBofXpdvU/s200/IMG00876.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5341975587912083682" /></a><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKCRyGcx4I/AAAAAAAAAsQ/bu-JB5HVtpI/s1600-h/IMG00874.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 200px; height: 160px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/SiKCRyGcx4I/AAAAAAAAAsQ/bu-JB5HVtpI/s200/IMG00874.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5341975350033041282" /></a>http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/05/photos-from-banff.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-18992864.post-1621679185884171318Thu, 21 May 2009 04:56:00 +00002009-05-21T09:30:57.910-04:00empty namemythical beastsPicassoQuineIs everything that can be imagined real?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/ShU67CY2zwI/AAAAAAAAAsA/oLFXr2LBvJ8/s1600-h/mythicbeasts.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 116px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/ShU67CY2zwI/AAAAAAAAAsA/oLFXr2LBvJ8/s400/mythicbeasts.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5338237719245410050" /></a>A couple of days ago, I went to see the <a href="http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/cmc/mythicbeasts/mythicbeasts01e.shtml">Mythic Beasts</a> special exhibition at the Canadian Museum of Civilization. It's a fascinating collection of artifacts and stories from around the world.<br /><br />Now, I have previously written about beasts like unicorns <a href="http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2007/12/things-that-probably-dont-exist.html">that (probably) don't exist</a>. What about the unicorn's cousin, Pegasus?<blockquote><i>How can we talk about Pegasus? To what does the word 'Pegasus' refer? If our answer is, 'Something,' then we seem to believe in mystical entities; if our answer is, 'nothing', then we seem to talk about nothing and what sense can be made of this? Certainly when we said that Pegasus was a mythological winged horse we make sense, and moreover we speak the truth! If we speak the truth, this must be truth about something. So we cannot be speaking of nothing.</i></blockquote><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/ShVAeTL_H9I/AAAAAAAAAsI/UCylGFZgxHo/s1600-h/pegasus.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 155px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/ShVAeTL_H9I/AAAAAAAAAsI/UCylGFZgxHo/s200/pegasus.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5338243822608392146" /></a>The quote&mdash;or perhaps it's a paraphrase&mdash;is from the Wikipedia entry for philosopher <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willard_Van_Orman_Quine">W.V. Quine</a>. In the philosophy of language, this is known as the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empty_name">problem of empty names</a>, and I stumbled on it yesterday by chance. But it reminded me of a curious quote I'd seen at the entrance to the exhibition:<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/ShU5h4FmQFI/AAAAAAAAArw/KkEg74PVqmU/s1600-h/everything2.jpg"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 114px;" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_H4P8nQ0jwwU/ShU5h4FmQFI/AAAAAAAAArw/KkEg74PVqmU/s400/everything2.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5338236187471921234" /></a>http://logbase2.blogspot.com/2009/05/is-everything-that-can-be-imagined-real.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Nick Barrowman)3